mapping

A map project

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Birding is a great hobby. You can go as hard (or not) as you want. You don’t need a lot of fancy gear–only a pair of binoculars and bird guide. Learning to identify birds may be challenging, but is always fun. There’s one big barrier, though–how do you find the birds?

eBird’s hotspots make answering this question a lot easier than it used to be, but unless you’re plugged in to your local community of birders you can miss out on all the insider knowledge. Which pullouts off the highway offer the best views of the ocean? When is the best time of year to visit a park? What random stands of trees, ponds, and freeway rest stops are known for catching rarities?

A friendly guide like Birding Oregon by John Rakestraw is a great help in solving this problem. John’s book is thorough, concise, and contains no maps whatsoever. No maps! Who writes a guidebook and includes no maps? It’s a deliberate artistic choice. “A 6″x9″ format does not lend itself to mas that are particularly useful,” John writes. “They would show either a very small area with no context, or a larger area with no detail.”

Here John and I appear to have artistic differences. While I agree that a map sized to fit in a standard paperback book is unlikely to useful for navigation, I find I still want maps for planning. Which of the sites he describes are clustered closely and can be visited together in a day, and which require a long detour to reach? Which would make a good driving break while traveling across the state? A map would help me decide.

And so a map is what I am planning to make.

A personal paracosm

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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.

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mapstock

Have I ever mentioned I like maps?

I act surprised when I say this, as if it were news to me. It is, though it shouldn’t be. In retrospect, the signs have been there the whole time. I remember lying on the living room floor as a child of some indeterminate age, half on the rug, half atop a large unfolded map. The map was one of those state maps members get for free from AAA: this one was of Oregon. The complex order of folds required to pack the map down into a compact little rectangle baffled me, but I always took the time to figure it out because I loved that map. I would spend hours poring over the lines, patterns, and differently colored patches, fascinated by all the placenames. Crater Lake was especially intriguing to me: I came again and again to the little blue circle, surrounded by its dark green park border, and dreamed of seeing it in three-dimensional space.

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