Lost Lake and Last Chance Mountain
Last night I covered my office with maps. I stayed up late and stitched together my favorite pieces of the Mojave: the Imperial Dunes and the Devil’s Playground, Last Chance Mountain and the Confusion Range. At dawn, I stepped back to admire my handiwork and discovered I’d turned into my father. Shortly before he died, he wallpapered a small room in New Orleans with maps of the bayou, marking the places he liked to fish: Jesuit Bend. Port Sulphur. Lost Lake.
For the first time in decades, I remembered the fat sheath of maps in my grandfather’s fishing boat, where I would marvel at the mythic language of Michigan’s lakes: Thunder Bay. Jackfish Channel. Knife River Harbor. I did not expect these maps of Death Valley and Joshua Tree to draw me into the past, to join me with my father and grandfather’s need to comprehend where they were. But it felt good to say hello to these memories, my ghosts. My grandfather. My father. And me, the end of the line. They had the water. I have the desert.
When J & I walking past an antique shop on in Aberdeen on our Saturday walks it often has old maps displayed in the window. One day we’ll find the perfect map of the city and/or the region. But I also find it strange that as a child from a landlocked city that I’ve found myself being able to living on the coast I rarely saw and so close to the mountains I always dreamed of. I’ve probably seen the sea more times in the last month than my entire life before moving here four years ago.
Thanks for sharing this, Will. I love this image of an ambient quest for the perfect map of one’s setting. My own search for detailed maps of the Mojave nearly led me into a Borgesian situation that would have required every wall in our home and then some. Glad you made it to the coast and the mountains. I wonder if people living by the sea or in the mountains ever dream of landlocked cities and flat fields.