A Map and a Compass
Maps & Triptiks
At 7:00 a.m., on a suffocating, Louisiana August morning in 1970, my college professor father loaded the 1966 Pontiac station wagon for our family vacation. He taught workshops each August at different universities around the eastern part of the country. This time we were destined for somewhere in Pennsylvania and we planned to sightsee along the way:
… cousins in Greensboro, North Carolina;
… the Baptists and the Smokies in Asheville;
… up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello;
… then an orgy of history and culture in museums and memorials of Washington, D.C.
But the first stop was Fernandina Beach, Florida, a languid town on Amelia Island, just off the northeast corner of Florida. Every summer we visited Grandma and Papa there. On those white, open beaches I’d romp in the salty Atlantic waves for hours, browning in the sun like a Louisiana roughneck and dreaming up my own safe world where I never felt out of place.
That morning, we pulled out of Hammond, Louisiana and headed down Highway 190. In the back seat, my sister napped like a curled up kitten in one corner. On the other side, my mother worried about traffic.
I sat up front.
My father wanted me there so he didn’t have to see or hear my white-knuckled mother’s anxious reactions to his driving.
I wanted me there because that meant I got to be keeper of the maps, the AAA Tourbooks, and the Triptik.
Back then, my imagination was much bigger than the mundane world I lived in. Television, books, and maps expanded that world and taught me how to dream. On a special place on his bookshelves, my father kept a box full of maps and atlases. When he wasn’t around to scold me for messing up his neatly ordered array, I would take out a folded map, spread it out on the floor, and study it like a general plotting a campaign to escape my stifling religious world, to “get out of OZ altogether,”
to explore a world that pulled me from the inside.
I didn’t know then that as spectacular and seductive as maps were, they could never lead me to the real place I was looking for.
Before each family trip, I went with my father to the AAA offices to get our traveling orders. We sat across the desk from Miz Vesta, the travel agent. This was a time when travel plans were all handled by an agent - plane tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, all of it.
It feels so long ago.
After her genteel pleasantries, she asked, ‘Where are you planning to travel, Dr. Gregory?”
Sigh. My father delighted in laying out the details of the trip.
As he spoke, Miz Vesta began snatching maps from their organized bins behind her: one for each state we would cross.
My father regaled her with all the stops we planned to make and she grabbed the Tour Books: soft cover books with entries listed like an encyclopedia:
… small towns like Spanish Fort, Alabama;
… or natural areas like The Great Smoky Mountains;
… tourist attractions like Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, Monticello; and the Smithsonian.
Then, without missing a beat, Miz Vesta pivoted in her rolling wooden chair to grab page after page of bi-folded sheets of paper, each one with a map on one side, with a smaller printed text on the folded inside, perforated at the ends.
One page.
Another.
Then, another.
Each one, a 4-hour window of time on a 55-mph interstate highway. Two hundred miles of other people’s lives whizzing past our windows.
Miz Vesta stacked all the pages into an ordered pile, all the while nodding and smiling in concert with my father’s words. With a highlighter perched in her meticulous hand, Miz Vesta squeaked a yellow line down the roads that made up the route she (and AAA) had determined we should take. She was the good witch of travel, and the maps, tour books, and triptik were the three companions to join us down the road.
When my sister woke up, she could play the role of Toto.
From the front seat of that 1966 Pontiac. I’d follow along each segment of the Triptik and report from the field:
“…next rest area in 25 miles.”
“… There’s gas at exit 234…”
”We are 15 miles from a town called Sweet Lips.”
Despite my frequent begging to do so, we never stopped at these places because that was not part of the plan. And, according to my father, who was not given to spontaneous acts, it was important to “make good time.”
Not All Who Are Who Lost, Wander`
I miss paper maps. No one - including me - uses them anymore. It’s GPS now. We are beholden to these digitized maps on the move that tell us which way to go so we don’t have to figure it out for ourselves. Just type in the address and follow orders. It’s our modern version of Miz Vesta and the Triptik.
Paper or pixels, the map’s goal is to get us where we are going as quickly as possible - to “make good time.” So useful are maps that they serve as metaphors for how we live our lives,
how we choose,
how we change, and
how we chart the journey of our lives.
I’ve looked to: religious maps (Evangelicalism, Mysticism, Charismatic Spirituality, Atheism),
… cultural maps (white, male, baby boomer, Christian, Academic, Queer),
… political philosophies (Freedom, Democracy, Equality),
… intellectual positions (Academic Freedom, Belief in Science, etc), and
… psychobabbly maps in self-help books (not to disparage - most have been helpful, but are definitely “of a kind.” That’s all I’m saying).
As the politicians say, “Mistakes were made,” but I was nothing if not dutiful in following my maps.
Yet, while painstakingly and faithfully trying to hew to these maps,
I realize that sometimes I feel very lost indeed.
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, “All who wander are not lost.”
But, I think the converse is also true: “Not all who are lost are wandering.”
It’s not for lack of a map that I feel lost in my life.
Maps are good. They’re just not enough.
Maps give me an overview of the terrain ahead, marking hills, rivers, roads, and landmarks that can help me orient myself to where I am at any moment. wBut, the problem with maps is they seduce us with a promise to make the journey easier and relieve us of the burden of having to think in the moment. We don’t have to figure out how to adjust our route to meet a detour or delay, and risk getting “lost” in the process. Maps (especially ones marked with Miz Vestas yellow highlighter), keep us on the path, undistracted and undeterred.
So three cheers for life’s maps!
Yet, maps obscure more than they reveal. Those detours and delays bring their own delightful finds:
…the old cinderblock dormitory in the little town in the Smokies that the gay couple turned into an acclaimed B&B;
…or the old diner in the middle of nowhere that boasts fans from miles away to line up for the best coconut cream and banana cream pies in North
Louisiana;
…or The NY Times award-winning, 8-seat cafe on the Oregon coast that serves the best breakfast west of the Mississippi.
The detours and delays create the journey more than the mindless monotony of the well-traveled road.
Joys. Tragedies.
Discoveries. Losses.
Sorrows. Pleasures.
Possibilities. Disappointments.
And defeats.
All of these, woven together in patterns both frightening and magnificent.
This is the journey;
this day in and day out,
breath to breath,
experience of being human
on this small blue dot.¹
In the end, what we are left with is not a destination, but a lived life. It’s the journey that gives us meaning, that changes us, not the destination. While our individual journeys start the same way and end at the same destination, no one’s path between the two is the same. Joseph Campbell (one of my patron saints), writes about the Knights of the Round Table and their quest for the Holy Grail:
"You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path.
If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential." ²
This is why maps don’t work very well for the day-to-day slog. Maps are records of trails others have blazed. Not the blueprints for your own.
If we only want to “make good time” and reach our destination, the details of the journey don’t matter. In fact, they can be an obstacle. But, if living a life in all its chaotic magnificence is the journey you want to take, then the adventures along the way are the whole point of it all.
Look At The Birds of the Air
I’m blessed to live a few blocks from Forest Park, one of the largest urban forested parks in the country. Each week, I walk miles across its many trails surrounded by Douglas firs, the fern-garnished understory, and the chorus of Wilson Warblers and Stellar Jays in the over story. And what stories they all tell!
In March, as I walked along the Leif Erickson trail, I heard the “honk..honk” of geese, “high in the clean, blue air” above me. ³ I stopped, and gazed up through the overstory to catch a glimpse of their formation gliding across the chilly Oregon sky.
Wings widespread.
Arrayed in regal formation.
Heading home without fear that they’d get lost.
Birds don’t use maps.
They travel across the globe, on schedule, year after year and land with precision at very specific destinations. Never wavering all along their trajectory.
North to south.
South to north.
Across their hemispheric ride, whatever menace they meet, they end up where they are supposed to be.
And what could be more glorious than just being where you are supposed to be?
Birds can navigate and divert because they are focused on the coordinates that mark their destination.
Birds use a compass.
According to my NPR podcast sources,⁴ migratory birds have sensors in their eyes connected to magneto-receptors in their little bird brains. This allows them to sync with the magnetic fields of earth and determine both:
(1) where they are at any given moment and
(2) in which direction they need to fly.
They take note of the sun’s position by day and seem to follow an internal “star map” at night, taking their cues from the constellations.
Joni says we are stardust - we should listen to the stars? ⁵
We are really not that much different than the birds. There are so many times where we just know in our cliched gut that something is the “right thing” or the “wrong thing.” We may not be able to explain how we know.
We just know
that we know.
You know?
A Life Lived
Like I said, I love maps. They capture my need to locate myself in the world, in relationships, and even within my own soul. But as I have reached a point in my life when the destination looms closer each year, I find that “making good time” is the last thing I’m concerned about. All the best of my life has come from going “off map.” I have discovered my compass and that it sometimes has a voice (Ah! The miracle of technology!)- and not always the “still, small” one of the Bible.
Sometimes that voice screams!!
It preaches to my heart in poetry,
and steers my steps with prose.
And along the way, I create a story.
A life.
There is a lovely poem by Mennonite poet, Sheri Hostetler. The poem is called “Instructions.” There’s a line that goes:
Keep this and only this:
What your heart beats loudly for
what feels heavy and full in your gut. ⁶
I’ll add this: whatever you do, keep your compass. Point it at true North and follow where it takes you.
When a map can help, consult it. Let it ground you when the voice of your compass is hard to hear above the clamor of life.
But remember that maps can’t tell you how to chart your unique path.
As Glinda said, “You’ve got to learn it for yourself.”
After all, the journey we take and the treasures we find are not without, but within. As T. S. Eliot says,
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.” ⁷
It would take half a century of wandering for me to do so.
I’m still wandering. But I’m finally learning about my compass.
A life lived, is a life discovered.
Not one travelled like a tourist.
The difference between the path of the yellow highlighter,
and that of the yellow brick road.
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Footnotes and works cited
¹ Sagan, Carl. 1990. Pale Blue Dot. Video. Carl Sagan YouTube Channel.
² Campbell, Joseph., & Moyers, Bill. (1988). The power of myth. Doubleday.
³ Oliver, Mary. (1986). Wild geese. In Dream Work. Atlantic Monthly Press.
⁴Bucko, K. (2022, February 24). Birds rely on an inner compass to guide long migrations. Earth.com. https://www.earth.com/news/birds-rely-on-an-inner-compass-to-guide-long-migrations/
⁵ Mitchell, Joni. Woodstock (2021 Remaster) · The Reprise Albums (1968-1971)℗ 1970 Rhino Entertainment Company, a Warner Music Group Company.
⁶ Hostetler, Sheri. "Instructions." A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry. Edited by Ann Hostetler, University of Iowa Press, 2003, pp. 240.
⁷ Eliot, T.S. "Little Gidding." Four Quartets. Faber and Faber, 1944