When Maps Became Important to Me
I have just returned from a funeral. An emotional 1 ½ day rollercoaster that turned from grieving to celebration and back numerous times brought me back to the realities of why we are here and what we should try to do with our time here. My Aunt Sylvia lived life with a passion and energy that most of us can only envy. Reliving memories with my cousins at the funeral brought back some very important experiences in my life.
I was just six years old and couldn’t remember going much further than to the other side of the Missouri River Bridge in Hannibal a few times to Illinois. So when I was told we were packing for a two week family vacation to California and Oregon, a gold rush of dreams filled my head. I could already see myself surfing in the Pacific, killing buffalo on the Plains, and making peace with every Indian I met along my way.
It was June 1978. We packed into a 1975 cargo style van (albeit it was by my standards “pimped” 70’s style) and after some hours of repacking the vestiges for the eight of us into a van that could barely hold that many people without luggage, we were on our way and reality began to set in. After the first 100 miles of Kansas on I-70 my six-year-old mind began to feel the drain of the Plains. My mother in her wisdom handed me the trusty Rand McNally’s and told me to help keep up with our location and planned stops. Thus began a long love affair with the representation of bigger, grander spaces on smaller spaces of paper and later in digital form. I kept up with everything my growing mind could grasp and learned to read maps in that one trip. I could still show you within a few miles the location of our car problem, our first night sleeping under the stars, the parking lot where my teenage brother threatened to leave the troupe, the casino I got my mom in trouble because I snuck in and put a nickel in a slot, and that wild beach in Northern California that had us spend the night with a group of hippies in a VW Micro and a motorcycle gang (some of the nicest folks we met the whole trip.) Someday I will write down all of my memories from this early adventure, but for now I hope you get some idea.
I loved my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Joe. They lived life like it was worth living and they gave me much more than I could ever have given them. You will be missed by us all…
Matt
So on the more recent trip, the children didn’t need to worry about mapping the car did it for us. I was still glued to the screen for large portions of the trip, but I wondered if I would have had the same interest as a young boy. Part of the great fun of maps and all encyclopedic knowledge is being able to share it with those around. It amazes me that with the wonders of technology that we have surrounding our everyday lives now that so many children I see seem almost immune to the mystery. They’ve grown up on video games and it just doesn’t seem as awe-inspiring to them. This is all probably just a sign that I’m getting old and I just don’t appreciate fully the way in which they view our world. I hope that’s the case.
I was just six years old and couldn’t remember going much further than to the other side of the Missouri River Bridge in Hannibal a few times to Illinois. So when I was told we were packing for a two week family vacation to California and Oregon, a gold rush of dreams filled my head. I could already see myself surfing in the Pacific, killing buffalo on the Plains, and making peace with every Indian I met along my way.
It was June 1978. We packed into a 1975 cargo style van (albeit it was by my standards “pimped” 70’s style) and after some hours of repacking the vestiges for the eight of us into a van that could barely hold that many people without luggage, we were on our way and reality began to set in. After the first 100 miles of Kansas on I-70 my six-year-old mind began to feel the drain of the Plains. My mother in her wisdom handed me the trusty Rand McNally’s and told me to help keep up with our location and planned stops. Thus began a long love affair with the representation of bigger, grander spaces on smaller spaces of paper and later in digital form. I kept up with everything my growing mind could grasp and learned to read maps in that one trip. I could still show you within a few miles the location of our car problem, our first night sleeping under the stars, the parking lot where my teenage brother threatened to leave the troupe, the casino I got my mom in trouble because I snuck in and put a nickel in a slot, and that wild beach in Northern California that had us spend the night with a group of hippies in a VW Micro and a motorcycle gang (some of the nicest folks we met the whole trip.) Someday I will write down all of my memories from this early adventure, but for now I hope you get some idea.
I loved my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Joe. They lived life like it was worth living and they gave me much more than I could ever have given them. You will be missed by us all…
Matt
So on the more recent trip, the children didn’t need to worry about mapping the car did it for us. I was still glued to the screen for large portions of the trip, but I wondered if I would have had the same interest as a young boy. Part of the great fun of maps and all encyclopedic knowledge is being able to share it with those around. It amazes me that with the wonders of technology that we have surrounding our everyday lives now that so many children I see seem almost immune to the mystery. They’ve grown up on video games and it just doesn’t seem as awe-inspiring to them. This is all probably just a sign that I’m getting old and I just don’t appreciate fully the way in which they view our world. I hope that’s the case.
posted by Matt Petre at 7:25 AM
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