Cartography

This is a map of San Miguel de Allende, in Guanajuato, Mexico.

If you click it, it'll get bigger, big enough you can just make out the street names. Click it again with the magnifying-glass zoom, and they're read clear as day.

I love looking at maps of places i'm going or places i've been. It's exciting and also comforting to be able to pore over them and say, Oh, here's where I'll live, and there's where the school is, that's where films are shown, where my friends will live.

Here's where i grew up, and here's Michelle's old house, and there's how far we rode our bicycles that one time in fifth grade.

I think it runs in the family. For as long as i can remember, my grandfather has pulled out maps to supplement stories or to talk about vacations or things that happened long ago. Even now, at 86, he keeps atlases in the magazine stand beside his big leather recliner, nevermind that about the furthest he travels these days is to eat supper out at the Golden Corral.

Perhaps this is because Papaw spent his entire professional life working with maps--railroad maps and trucking-route maps and airline maps. He was what they now call a Supply Chain Manager for the Berkline furniture mill in Morristown, TN, making sure that materials got to the factory on time and that the products got to stores around the country. My entire adult life, he's followed my cross-country moves through those magazine-stand atlases, looked up my neighborhoods and shown people when they visit, here's where Rachel is.

Evanston, Illinois. Allston, Massachusetts. Hollywood, California. Astoria, New York. He found them all, pulled out city maps and looked up the cross-streets for every studio apartment and third-floor walk-up. No matter how far away i was, in whatever time zone, Papaw could find me, exactly there right on those maps.

My dad is big on maps, too. As a kid, he bought me puzzle maps, Tennessee and the fifty states and a split-open flayed-looking flat globe of the world. We always had road-atlases in the utility drawer, and folding maps of dozens of cities and states. When i was small, I remember him finger-following red interstates and blue highways and narrow windey black rural-route roads, talking about the differences, big and small and where they led to. Here's where we're going on vacation this year, down this interstate to this city here, in this state, this far away, this many inches is this many miles. Fascinating.

Now that i think about it, i don't know that the women in my family have cared much about maps. I don't think they've got anything against them--my mom and my aunt, my Mamaw and my grandfather's wife Jean, they all look at Papaw's maps with polite interest when he pulls them out to point to something. Here's where Rachel is. Well, isn't that interesting? But i can't recall any of them producing any atlases of their own as part of everyday conversation. Or maybe, like me, they just look things up cartographically on their own time and don't think to share them.

Well, until now.

Look at the big version of this map. To the left of the large-point legend reading Market Bistro (Films), there's a street running vertically called 28 de Abril Norte, jigging off at a dogleg as it goes up.

This is the street on which i will live.

I don't know what the historical significance of April 28th might be for Mexicans, why San Miguel has a street named for that date. Googling around doesn't give a lot of clues either. My money's on Miguel Ramos Arizpe, a distinguished citizen who advocated for Mexico's right to seek independence before the Spanish Court in the 19th century. He died on April 28, 1843. I'll find out soon enough; i'll ask my landlady, Elvia, on Friday.

Follow the line of 28 de Abril Norte up to where it ends in a T-intersection with a street called Umaran. Just south of that T-intersection, that's where my house will be. Elvia's house. La Casa de Elvia.

La Pamplonada, that is where my classes will be held, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. I wish there were some way to layer over some topographical information, as i'm told that the walk from my place to the school is uphill, San Miguel being a mountain town. I'm not concerned--after growing up in Appalachia and college in Knoxville, i can walk up a hill, no problem. Still, it'd be neat to see: how steep?

Hacienda de los Flores--the Plantation of Flowers--that's the fanciest place students may choose to live. I'm not living there, obviously; it's suites and the folks who come as couples or families snap them up. Perhaps though, that is where some friends i don't yet have will live.

Traveling to anywhere you've never been always feels like a bit of a leap of faith. It's scary, but thrilling, and you always think about all the best and worst things it might bring, even though you can't know til you up and go.

By the same token, reading a map is like saying your prayers. Does it really help at all? I reckon it does if you think it does.




Three more days, and i'm there.