Mapmaking

I am in Sandy, Oregon, at the base of Mt. Hood, and my tire is blown out. I’m waiting for the tow truck guy to help me change it, because I am inept and Subaru offers this service for free. It was raining when I pulled over, but now it is snowing, and the sky, while darker, is laced and the thing about snow is it makes me look up. Rain, I just keep my head down. But snow drifts when it falls and stalls air and the moments it carries, and if I watch, I slow a bit, too, breathe for a second or two.

The guy’s a little surly when he arrives. Grumpy. He’s had trouble finding me, I’d left my phone in the car while standing outside, missed his calls. And while I did give exact coordinates to the dispatcher, they apparently didn’t get relayed to him. He won’t look me in the eye and lectures me about how he can’t change a tire if he doesn’t know where I am. Well, he’s got a point there. I apologize, thank him, apologize some more. In about 30 seconds he has my spare on, stands up, wipes his hands on his jeans.

“You don’t have far to go, yeah?”
I tell him I actually have to somehow make it on this spare to Portland.
“You won’t make it.”
“I have to make it.”
“Well, you won’t. Tire’ll blow out on the freeway. You’re too far from home. These things overheat and aren’t designed to go that far.”

I shrug. We just look at each other for a couple seconds. We both know we’re sort of remote and it’s Sunday, the day after Christmas, and tire stores are all shut down.

“I’ll just start driving and see what happens,” I say.
He shakes his head.
Then his face suddenly just softens, he narrows his eyes and does a little half grin.

“Okay, then. Adventure. You know the back roads?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, again. I’ll make you a map. Don’t go over 35 all the way home. You might be able to make it this way.”

He climbs up in his cab and rips out paper from a yellow legal pad. He draws lines, and Xs, and labels roads and turns and roadmarks, like the John Deere tractor shop where I’ll turn right.

“Call if you get lost, I’ll set you straight,” he says from his window as he pulls away.

It’s mid-afternoon and the light is grey and dense and washes evenly over the sky, between trees. I’ve never been on these roads, up and down these hills. Tree farms quilt the landscape, a country market and brick tavern seem to appear every few miles. The occasional school. Farm houses set back from the road stream chimney smoke that mirrors the streaks of darkening impending rain held in the clouds. There is uninterrupted horizon out here, like at the coast when looking out across the ocean to some sort of other side, not meant to be seen, but wondered about, considered.

I haven’t travelled this slowly for so many hours (and it does indeed take hours to get home at this pace) since the Sunday drives I think about for the first time in probably 30 years. My dad would come to the house and pick us up. Even though they weren’t really together, my mom would sit in the front seat, and my sister and I would slide along the leather bench of the station wagon in the back. My mom always wanted to go out of the city, same kinds of rural roads as the ones I travelled today. She’d always ask my dad to drive really slowly so she could look at the horses and fencelines, wonder about the age of the farm houses. In the summer there would be roadside stands, and we’d stop and get corn, peaches. She always talked about someday moving to the country, selling the house in the suburbs, living on a few acres. We could ride horses together, she and I. We could garden, she’d teach me to can. But the somedays folded into the todays and she still has the house I grew up in, though she’s not there much anymore, she’s not anywhere anymore.

I make it home. I pull into my driveway, sit there a moment, watch the picture of this piece of world out my windshield blur as the rain hits and stays. I send my mapmaker friend a message, telling him the tire held, thanking him for his map, which I kept on my lap the whole way. I walk up the steps to my house. It’s warm inside, the kids and dog greet me with a clamor down the stairs.

I collect geography dictionaries and books. I love them. My favorite is from 1848, the title of which reads exactly: Mitchell’s Ancient Geography, designed for Academies, Schools, and Families, A System of Classical and Sacred Geography, Embellished with Engravings of Remarkable Events, Views of Ancient Cities, and Various Interesting Antique Remains, Together with an Ancient Atlas, Containing Maps Illustrating The Work.

Kid you not.

Some guy named Henry Hickok carefully pencilled his name, and the date 1849, on the front page. I wonder who he was, why he had this book, if he ran his finger under the same lines I do.

It’s a funny book. There’s a chapter called, “Greece, Italy, etc.” (etc.??) and the first line in chapter 20, “Asia, etc.” is, “The term Asia, as now understood, was not used by the inspired writers.” Which made me laugh out loud the first time I read it. And a very large portion of the book is questions, “How many years have elapsed since the Creation? Since the Deluge? Since the building of the Tower of Babel? Where was Sicyon? Sidon?”

In The Nature of Geography, another of my favorite finds, published in 1939, the author writes, “It is the undemonstrated assumption that the landscape–the visible surface–is more fundamental to the total complex of an area than, say, the invisible climate, or the houses are more fundamental than the people who build them.”

Or the map more significant than the way one stranger gets another to home–the visible and invisible kind, through dormant orchards, winding roads, memory, winter sky.