Brennan Scott shares the importance of holding on to physical maps.
A younger colleague of mine is traveling to a region of California that I know well. I said to her, “I have a great map of the area. I’ll bring it in for you.” “A map?” she asked, “Like a paper map?” My childhood home contained innumerable meticulously folded maps. In those days, one could walk into AAA and ask for a roadmap before embarking on an adventure.
When I moved to the East Coast and drove a solo serpiginous cross-country route, I brought maps that had hand-notated points of interest. When I later moved to Sacramento, my dad gave me a map of his childhood city; on it written the address of his old house on Marshall Way. I still have that map with the handwritten note; the house is still there; my father is gone.
Maps are a frozen moment in time, depicting the roads and town names extant at the moment it was printed. They are the template on which we draw our plans, and they are the journal by which we can look back and retrace our path. Much like grandma‘s cookbook containing kitchen memories documented as stains, smudges, thumbprints and torn pages; a map is also a living document, capturing its own coffee spills, fast food smears and notations.
In the 1982 novel “Blue Highways,” the author William Least Heat-Moon chronicles his odyssey of 13,000 miles throughout the United States taking only the blue highways. Blue highways were how older Rand McNally atlases depicted the smaller roads, with red being used for the larger, soulless interstate highways. The book was not about the destination, but the America he found along the way.