The Problem with Maps

From John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (Penguin, 2017):

“For weeks I had studied maps, large-scale and small, but maps are not reality at all—they can be tyrants. I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails” (23).

“There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. … Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains” (70).

And from Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (Vintage, 2000):

“In setting out, however, the traveler immediately confronts the problem of the map, an organization of the land according to a certain sense of space and an evaluation of what is important. I traveled everywhere with maps, no one of which was entirely accurate. They were the projection of a wish that the space could be this well organized. You cannot blame the maps, of course; nor can you travel without them. I was glad to pull them out of a pack or a back pocket and find clarification. … I knew that mixture of satisfaction and desire—to know exactly how one is situated in the vastness; and the wish to fully comprehend the space a map renders and sets borders to. But I would try to be wary. Even a good map, one with the lines and symbols of a handwritten geography on it, where [Yi-Fu] Tuan’s ‘spaces’ have been turned into ‘places,’ masquerades as an authority. What we hold are but approximations of what is out there. Neatly folded simulacra” (279-280).

That last phrase, “Neatly folded simulacra,” recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s one-paragraph short story, “On Exactitude in Science.” 

P.S. September 4: When I put these quotations by Steinbeck and Lopez together, I had no idea that Lopez was a Steinbeck fan and had once met him when attending summer camp with Steinbeck’s sons. 

"The People Who Change Nature"

“A Yup’ik hunter on Saint Lawrence Island once told me that what traditional Eskimos fear most about us is the extent of our power to alter the land, the scale of that power, and the fact that we can easily effect some of these changes electronically, from a distant city. Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, ‘the people who change nature’” (39).

“What every culture must eventually decide, actively debate and decide, is what of all that surrounds it, tangible and intangible, it will dismantle and turn into material wealth. And what of its cultural wealth, from the tradition of finding peace in the vision of an undisturbed hillside to a knowledge of how to finance a corporate merger, it will fight to preserve” (313).

From Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (Vintage, 2000).

Reading Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

I don’t like cold. I don’t like winter. I like the look of fresh snow—from inside a cozy home. So it surprised me that one of the books I have most enjoyed reading this year is Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986), a sprawling, 400-page tome on a part of the world I would never visit. It’s even more surprising given that I don’t read much related to the sciences and I probably haven’t watched a nature documentary since March of the Penguins. The later chapters of the book—on maps and geography, on the thrilling and often tragic history of arctic exploration, and on the plight of the present-day Arctic, complete with Wendell Berry-esque indictments of industrial hubris—were more my kind of thing, but I was already hooked by the early chapters on Arctic animals: muskoxen (of all things), polar bears, narwhals, migration patterns. These early chapters were assigned for a spring seminar on creative writing about place, but this summer I read the rest for myself.

Three takeaways from the experience of reading this: First, as William Zinsser says in On Writing Well, any topic can make for good, engrossing non-fiction writing if the writer is passionate about his or her topic and a gifted writer who can deftly balance substance and style. Second, we should from time to time be willing to explore, with a gifted writer as our guide, topics entirely foreign to us—and stick with it even if the going is rough or boring at first. It will take some effort to learn to appreciate the kinds of details the writer values, details we wouldn’t have noticed ourselves. The length of Lopez’s book is valuable for this: learning to see, and growing to love what the writer loves, takes time. Third, practicing patient attentiveness in one area can help us be more attentive in others. Slowing down to read what Lopez has to say about icebergs and light phenomena for almost fifty pages can make us more aware of the wonders around us.