A man and his maps

Chris and I both like presents that are either a) exactly what we want or b) money. I also like c) surprising, unusual, expensive, and arty presents, but I don’t believe Chris falls into this same category. He’s more into d) trendy, technological, expensive and cool gadgets. He has an external hard drive and an I-Pod, for instance, but today he filled a great absence in his heart of hearts—he got a Global Positioning Device with his birthday cash.

He’s such a navigational kind of guy. He reads maps, almost for a living. He absolutely adores them. I used to give him giant historical map books, until I realized that he really just wanted the DeLorme Atlas and Gazetteer for any state within a easy driving distance. And several copies of the South Carolina one, please, because they don’t last long with the use they get. I have old road atlases that I tear pages out of to gift wrap his presents (or rather, his annual dose of Simpson’s DVDs and I-Tunes gift cards). I would flip through the maps, finding the perfect map of Alabama, say, for this year, until I used up all the ones that had any personal relevance, after which I just started using Montana and whatnot. When he found Google Earth, I thought he would die of happiness. It would’ve only been more perfect if it hadn’t been free so I could’ve bought it for him and surprised him.

When he taught out of town the first year we moved here, he would come home from work a different way every day—you cannot imagine how many little back roads, both paved and unpaved, that South Carolina offers the adventurous driver, particularly if he doesn’t mind fording the occasional stream. Since Chris started kayaking, we’ve acquired one or two maps of various watery locales he likes to frequent, but the GPS—with GPS, he can know his longitude and latitude any minute. He can measure his mileage with an odometer. Before GPS, he could only trace his finger along the map to show the curvy route he paddled (and show us the digital pictures, which I’m afraid he did more often before I picked on him once by exclaiming “look, another tree!”). “It is the journey that matters in the end,” says Ursula Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness, and on the bracelet Chris bought me again, but for Chris, I think it is not only the journey, but planning the path, imagining the depth of the waters, and later, retracing his route again. The GPS seems something like a bookmark to me, saving his place in the narrative, a weighty task for something the size of a cell phone.

He brought it in at one point tonight, maybe taking a break from the instructional video that came with it, to show me how it could tell us what gas stations were at each exit. (I was amazed, really, that this marvel of modern technology didn’t also compare gas prices at the Shell and BP, but I guess that’ll come out in the next model.) I was wading through my email, piled up since Thursday, and didn’t realize he couldn’t get online to play with his new software until too late, so I am planning to work on other projects tomorrow night—and I believe that next Saturday may be a perfect day for kayaking. He can wear that t-shirt I got him a few years ago, perfect for the irreverent English teacher, although it doesn’t quite meet the dress code: “I took the road less traveled by, and now where the hell am I?” Now he’ll always know.