Internal Mapping, Pt. II
College:
I'm driving home in a caravan with friends, all of us bound for the DC area. Partway there, we grow tired. We had planned to stop at my house and unload stuff from my friend's Subaru wagon into my parents' house. Instead, when we talk at a rest stop, he says he'd rather drive straight home.
"Can you give me directions to your house?" Thomas asks. "A map? I like maps."
"Yeah, sure." I grab a blank sheet of paper and sketch out how to get to my house from the DC beltway. I deliberately foreshorten the 395 beltway itself and 70N as well, so I can draw a more accurate picture of Route 28 to Black Rock and, on the other side, Route 117 to Seneca to Black Rock. I've driven the areas close to my house in the light and the dark, sometimes literally (although briefly) with my eyes closed. These are roads I know. The map is quick.
A few days later, Thomas drives up to my house. After a shoulder-thumping hello - Thomas is not much on hugs, at least from other guys - he gawks at the woods around us. He laughs.
"This really is the middle of nowhere," he says.
"Told you."
"Yeah, lots of people say they live nowhere. But you literally have cow fields on every side. And then there's this forest." He flashes the piece of paper.
"The map worked," I observe.
"You fucking know this road. It's kind of insane. I came up route 117 and every turn is exactly where you drew it, every little church. Every big tree on Black Rock is right there, on the map. The creek. The bridge. Everything." We share a big smile and I realize he's driven from the center of a big city, Washington DC, for an hour to get to me, to here, to nowhere.
"The boxes can wait," I tell him. I motion to the house. "Come on in."
At this point my writing was improving but I hadn’t stopped drawing. Both sets of skill were finding a way to coexist. Although I blame my writing, hobby for my waning nonverbal mental skills, maybe the real reasons are more closely tied to giving up math, geometry, and drawing. Once, they were daily habits.
One year after college:
I’m starting to feel my mental mapping skills fading. I've been to my friend Richard's apartment once before. It's in Rockville, not too far from his work. And once is usually all I need. This time, I get partway into Rockville and I start feeling uncertain. His apartment complex has a bunch of tall buildings, all alike.
Naturally, I hadn't asked him for directions. I had just said I'd meet him there at four in the afternoon. With three minutes to go, I pull into the wrong apartment entrance.
When I eventually find the building and enter the lobby, I wish I had looked at his apartment number. I had counted on finding it by its location in my memory, as usual. I know the feeling of the floor, the kind-of-stained carpet, the beige walls.
When I get to the right place, I tap on the door. It feels wrong. I look at it more closely. This isn't the right knocker. It's brighter colored. When I wander a little farther down the hall, I recognize the wear on the metal, the peephole above, the room number. This is it. I take a longer look at the number, really trying to remember it for the first time.
When I step inside, I glance at Richard's wall clock. I'm at seven minutes past the hour
"Sorry I'm late," I say.
"It's only a few minutes." He shrugs it off.
"I got disoriented. I figured I could duplicate how I got here last time but I had to double back when I didn't recognize a turn."
"Well, what roads did you take?"
"I don't know the names."
We chat for a while. It turns out I missed all the landmarks he uses. He brings up a bunch of them to see if I'm paying attention to the landscape. Apparently not, because I can't picture a single one. He orients himself by stores, signs, statues, and skyscrapers, none of which I ever notice. I passed by them dozens of times and I never caught a glimmer of their existence. And of course I don't know the names for any of the roads, although I'm aware of a couple of their route numbers.
"Never mind how you got here," Richard snorts. "If you don't see the landmarks and don't know the names of any roads, how do you ever get anywhere?"
I shrug, struggling for a way to explain the maps in my head.
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