For the Love of Maps

I looked at an atlas this morning. A real, flesh and paper book of maps. It activated in me a rush of energy, fire, lust for travel, urge to explore. It brought to mind childhood memories of pouring over piles of National Geographic maps, getting a sense of the world, the planet I so desperately wanted to explore, perhaps to escape the harsh neighborhood I grew up in. Thank God for my mom, whose subscription to National Geographic ranged from 1932 onward. She never discarded a single issue. We had a wooden magazine rack crammed full of the maps that had been sent along with select months. I would excitedly pour through the smooth shiny pages of NG, reverently pull out the map, smooth the creases at the folds on the worn living room rug and quietly sound out the names of the exotic towns on the sheet; Ouagadougou, Popocatepetl, Ulan Bator. I would dream of going to places that no longer exist or at least aren’t named the same; Ceylon, Siam, Rhodesia, Persia. I dreamed of traveling the Silk Road. I’m happy to have made it to Burma when it was Burma, and to have passed along parts of the Silk Road, but there are countless places I still want to explore.

When I was about 9 years old, after seeing an after school special on TV about a kid in Australia with a pet koala and a wallaby, I declared to my mom that I wanted to go to the Outback. Soon thereafter, she handed me a brand new book about Australia. She never said, “No, you can’t go”, she never intimated that it was a foolish or unreasonable dream. She just got me more information and later in life I ended up living there for a time. I credit mom for setting me on a path of wanderlust. Maybe it is in the blood. Her mom emigrated from Spain, her dad from Denmark. My maternal grandparents met in San Francisco and so my mother’s existence began. All the women in my immediate family have traveled all around the globe. Both my sisters and I have been to more countries than we can count. My mother raised 5 children first but then set out on her own adventures to numerous foreign climes. The men in my family are another story. Neither of my brothers has ventured far beyond the western states and my dad was in his late 70’s before he ventured outside our own US border and then it was just to fish in Mexico and he said he’d never do it again. He was an outdoorsman, very active, and I attribute my athleticism to him, but the wanderlust, the tendency towards peregrination comes from mom. Now, the mere sight of a map stirs the fire and I start to plan my next journey.

“We travel not for trafficking alone
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned
For lust of knowing what cannot be known
We take that golden road to Samarkand”

From Hassan...The Golden Journey to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker

Our own caravan along the Silk Road in Ladakh