The Path We Take (replay)

Today is the day we put the new ram in with the flock for breeding. He is a handsome boy and should be more than up for the challenge of mating twenty ewes. The three other rams will be moved to a smaller winter paddock and the main flock moved into a new larger pasture. The freezer lambs will stay put for now, gaining weight, until their date with destiny in January.

As you can tell from the header this week, I find the trumpet vine flowers captivating.

Meanwhile, I have been working on an advice column for aspiring farmers of our ilk, the small diverse farm. It is directed at a young man who has many talents, except for navigating. He inspired the piece below (first published in 2017). I’ll return next week with that advice post… or not. Enjoy your day.

Turn left in 300 feet … turn left … turn left…. Rerouting … rerouting … rerouting.

Recently, a young relative of mine set out on a 600-mile road trip to attend his cousin’s wedding — and got lost halfway there when his phone went dead. Hearing of his misadventure I was confused. How could someone go so far and then get lost? And how did a dead phone terminate his travels? Did he not consult a map? Own one? Pick up the free one at the state line? No, apparently a map wasn’t needed because he had a smart phone. Until it wasn’t. The would-be wedding guest set off on an eight-hour-plus journey, armed with no more than an address to guide him in where and how he was going. So, what did he do, when the phone, and consequently the GPS, died? He turned around and drove home.

As kids, my older brother and I would sit down with the National Geographic and, starting in June, begin to dream about August vacation destinations. The back pages of the magazine were chock-full of advertisements from state tourism boards. We’d send off for packets from exciting places like Montana, New Mexico, and Idaho, all locations with elevations higher than the six-feet-above-sea-level spot that we called home. Soon, fat packages of maps and “things to do” would arrive in the mail.

The maps would be unfolded on the kitchen table, where we would trace out routes we might take on the most narrow and obscure road possible. “Let’s drive down this little road in this valley south of Missoula,” I’d say. We’d pull out the encyclopedia and read about places we were going to visit. There were shoeboxes jammed with maps in the closet, a big globe and stacks of atlases in the den.

Today, in my own library, there resides a broad assortment of state and international maps and world and historical atlases. Because, maps give us more than a hopeful path to a distant destination. They inform. Why is there a Northwest Angle exclave in Minnesota, and just what is an exclave anyway? Where were the original colonial boundaries of North Carolina? How did the frontier of the late Roman Empire contract? Maps inform, and they also feed our curiosity: Is Puerto Rico surrounded by water? (Why, indeed it is, Mr. President.) They serve as a springboard into the past, present, and future. And, yes, even answer the mundane: What are my options for getting to a wedding in Oregon?

Of course, GPS is a remarkable technological feature. It gets us to a destination without getting lost, without having to wonder where we are. Yet, cocooning ourselves in a cushion of geographical illiteracy also breeds a listless lack of awareness, demanding nothing more from us than an abiding self-interest. And, in the absence of an alternative mode of mapping — whether it’s orienting to the sun or grabbing the gazetteer — when the GPS goes dark, it leaves us with no option but to turn around and go home, wherever that might be.

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Reading this weekend (2020): Corduroy (Adrian Bell)

There Once Was a Farm

There once was a farm that became an airport. So reads the first line of our modern fairytale, our religion for the age. It is also the promotional tagline chosen by the boosters of Pittsburgh’s airport, where a pair of signs sporting the slogan hang throughout. The first sign is a bucolic photograph of the pre-airport farm; the second is what the displacement wrought. Passersby are meant to be inspired.

I’m guessing most of the 9 million-plus visitors to PIT yearly never give a thought to whether the farm-to-airport evolution was for the better. We never look very long or critically at our degraded industrial or suburban landscapes. When we’ve seen one strip mall, we’ve seen them all — they are both everywhere and nowhere.

The smug before-and-after signs hang near a large interactive map of the world provided courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University’s EarthTime tool. The storyboard in front of the EarthTime display encourages viewers to observe through satellite imagery the impact of our very existence on the land. (The irony of the technology needed to produce this visual record was not lost on this viewer.)

The satellite imagery covers the years 1984 through 2016. That the record begins with that auspicious year must certainly mean something for a more skilled writer than I, or perhaps it’s just a cruel joke by the geographer. To interact, users simply punch in a locale and the image zooms in and displays how that landscape appeared in 1984. The screen then scrolls through the snapshots over the next three decades.

The woman standing next to me watched my search and said, “Impressive.”

I replied, “Depressing.”

“Not at all,” she said. “Look at what we can accomplish.”

“Exactly,” I answered.

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Reading this weekend: Sword of Kings (Cornwell), the master of manly historical fiction. Where one can stand with Uhtred in the shield wall from the comfort of the reading chair.

The Path We Take

Turn left in 300 feet … turn left … turn left…. Rerouting … rerouting … rerouting.

Recently, a young relative of mine set out on a 600-mile road trip to attend his cousin’s wedding — and got lost halfway there when his phone went dead. Hearing of his misadventure I was confused. How could someone go so far and then get lost? And how did a dead phone terminate his travels? Did he not consult a map? Own one? Pick up the free one at the state line? No, apparently a map wasn’t needed because he had a smart phone. Until it wasn’t. The would-be wedding guest set off on an eight-hour-plus journey, armed with no more than an address to guide him in where and how he was going. So, what did he do, when the phone, and consequently the GPS, died? He turned around and drove home.

As kids, my older brother and I would sit down with the National Geographic and, starting in June, begin to dream about August vacation destinations. The back pages of the magazine were chock-full of advertisements from state tourism boards. We’d send off for packets from exciting places like Montana, New Mexico, and Idaho, all locations with elevations higher than the six-feet-above-sea-level spot that we called home. Soon, fat packages of maps and “things to do” would arrive in the mail.

The maps would be unfolded on the kitchen table, where we would trace out routes we might take on the most narrow and obscure road possible. “Let’s drive down this little road in this valley south of Missoula,” I’d say. We’d pull out the encyclopedia and read about places we were going to visit. There were shoeboxes jammed with maps in the closet, a big globe and stacks of atlases in the den.

Today, in my own library, there resides a broad assortment of state and international maps and world and historical atlases. Because, maps give us more than a hopeful path to a distant destination. They inform. Why is there a Northwest Angle exclave in Minnesota, and just what is an exclave anyway? Where were the original colonial boundaries of North Carolina? How did the frontier of the late Roman Empire contract? Maps inform, and they also feed our curiosity: Is Puerto Rico surrounded by water? (Why, indeed it is, Mr. President.) They serve as a springboard into the past, present, and future. And, yes, even answer the mundane: What are my options for getting to a wedding in Oregon?

Of course, GPS is a remarkable technological feature. It gets us to a destination without getting lost, without having to wonder where we are. Yet, cocooning ourselves in a cushion of geographical illiteracy also breeds a listless lack of awareness, demanding nothing more from us than an abiding self-interest. And, in the absence of an alternative mode of mapping — whether it’s orienting to the sun or grabbing the gazetteer — when the GPS goes dark, it leaves us with no option but to turn around and go home, wherever that might be.