A twelve-year-old boy in Queens, NY, and I have something in common: we’re both making a map of places we can’t go.
Brendan Koerner describes his son’s painstakingly created paracosm, constructed with Google Maps and a stack of handwritten notes, as an exercise in escapism and control. Cartographers, Koerner notes, are often drawn to maps as a way to escape reality, the same way bibliophiles are drawn to books. For someone trapped inside an apartment during a pandemic, the baseball stadiums of New England are no less fantastical—or inviting—than the soft green hills of the Shire.
I’ve been less trapped than most, thanks to my fieldwork. But while getting out of the city (heck, even getting out of my house!) and into the forest has been an incredible relief after weeks spent within a few blocks, it has also brought with it a large amount of stress and uncertainty. Far from being new, this is just another layer of stress on top of the existing pile of worry, anxiety, and desperation called graduate school. In reality, I’ve felt trapped since long before the pandemic began.
For someone who has moved every six months for the past seven years, staying in one city for three years has been a difficult adjustment. It’s been made even more difficult by a student’s budget and time commitments that render even short trips somewhere between implausible and impossible. So, like Koerner’s son, I started making a map.
The map is still in it’s early stages, and I’m in no hurry to finish it—after all, once it’s done what will I do for escapism??—but as it grows I hope to share it with you so that maybe you, too, can be inspired to find joy in places you can’t be.
Bird, Wandering 