Personal Cartography: Mapping Out MA One Town At A Time
When my father would take me on road trips, he would often put a large atlas at my lap and tell me to navigate. Opening the manifold I was quickly confused by the vast array of lines, webbed roads and concentric topological patterns. This was the equivalent of giving a baby a plastic steering wheel and saying “Follow that taxi.” But I looked on with intent, listening to the audiobooks we would pick up from Cracker Barrel as the background blurred behind us. They were tapes back then.
Growing up, the only way I really knew if one place was connected to another was to walk from point A to point B. Walking (and at that time it felt like that’s all I ever did,) I could notice little details and landmarks that could help in connecting two places in what was typically a very spacey mind. Obviously I was aware that there were all kinds of places I’ve been, but being a passenger who likes to read, I’d have no idea really how I got to any of them. The school, the mall, Home Depot: these were all islands that I could transport to once I entered an automobile and waited a boring amount of time. The only place that I really had mapped out in my head was the neighborhood that I biked in, and even then I sometimes got lost.
It wasn’t until I became a pizza delivery driver in highschool, sometime after I got my license that I was really able to start connecting these nodes together from sheer practice. I’d get a call, take the order, jot down the address and consult the large yellowed map taped to the side of the walk-in fridge and consult the street key for approximate coordinates. But more often, I’d simply put the address into my GPS and go on autopilot assimilating geography through osmosis.
I hate cars in a sort of broad impressionistic way. While I understand the portrait of individual freedom that’s painted, pragmatically, it never made sense to me to have a hundred or a thousand drivers maintaining a high level of alertness across hundreds of miles, when you can have a hundred or a thousand passengers reading, working or napping in a train while only one conductor needs to conduct.
I had and continue to have a romantic notion of trains as a primary mode of transportation. Ever the aspiring nomad, I would imagine hopping trains to explore and see all there is to see. Cross the country, form friendships, map out reality.
As an aspirational voyager, I’m surprised at how little travel I do. I think there’s a few reasons that I can quickly list that inform this tendency.
Being evicted in 2016, I’ve been in a constant state of catching up, financially.
I have familial obligations that keep me rooted to this area.
Traffic fills me with a deep dread and I’ll always schedule on off-hours or remain local to avoid it.
Being in car accidents and seeing the statistics associated with auto fatalities have made me very conscience of how frequently I’m on the road
The last couple cars I had were riddled with issues that always made driving more than an hour a bit of a gamble.
Lockdown and the pandemic conditioned me to stay locationally constrained and probably has informed more of my habits than I realize.
Reading this back, I feel like I’ve portrayed myself as a recluse. And while I have my hermit days, I do make it a goal of mine to go to different landscapes, escape to a vacation destination or make my way out to some distant special event, (when I can afford to and never often.) And that’s the thing that I really want to change, and I’ve decided the most cost-effective way to do this would be to start with all the new places that are quite close. Start with the streets and neighborhoods in Lowell I’ve never been to and expand into the great unknown, the suburbs. And past that? Further.
I’ve recently begun my objective to, like thistlewood, tumble about and create my own mental maps of the world around me. I’ve become my own personal cartographer, pulling out my atlas and looking at all those lines, driving down them to see towns I’ve never heard of before. I’ve become amazed at how many there are and equally by how few cities there are. There are over three hundred towns and cities but only nine of them have populations above a hundred thousand. Though imagining such numbers has always been abstract to me. It does make me think of something I heard when attending a media conference. When the conversation turned to politics, specifically how Massachusetts is a progressive state, a point was made that the blue is very much concentrated in densely populated cities but as your sprawl out into rural MA it can quickly turn very red. I’m curious about this statement.
In a world where you can see a rapid kaleidoscopic view of the planet through our crystal ball devices, I want to look up and see it for myself. And not just the tourist traps, the instagrammable moments and the promise of hyped up locales. I want to see the mundane and monotonous. I want to see other people’s normal. Read their newspapers and talk to them about what’s on their mind. I want to find adventure and absurdity on a Tuesday morning in Gosnold, Massachusetts: population 64.
We’re very used to having the chaos of reality mediated and interpreted for us, and in many ways this is necessary and essential, especially when one is trying to refine one’s own thoughts and opinions and politics. But media is always supplementary to our own lived experiences and the data we collect from our senses and intuition.
I suppose I’ll end this sentiment with an acknowledgement that this is actually a very hard thing to do because you need time and transportation. The buses and the trains and subways have specific routes and do not deviate into the vague areas of the state. You will need a car, and if you’re currently looking for a car right now, you are likely very unhappy with the process. I hear there are waitlists and deposits that must be made before you’re even considered for some new models. And the used car market is absurdly high in and of itself, let alone the prospective cost of repair if you get something on the cheaper end.
You could potentially make a dent in the lists of towns and cities in MA by biking, but it will likely have to be on a day that you’re not working since you’ll have to bike for about an hour to really get anywhere and you’ll want time to get back and eat dinner and such. And if you’re living in the city, you may very well be working a second or third job just so you can afford to stay in one place. And streaming services, the doom scroll and the internet in general become, understandably, much more cost effective ways to tour and to see.
And for some safety is a legitimate concern. As we approach those darker corners of the state, what prejudices and mentalities have been fermenting within media echo chambers and through derisive rhetoric. What does a local think when some long haired ethnically ambiguous queer person floats in to town with a camera and questions? Very nice and kind things, I hope.
It’s not a particularly easy time to be a nomad. But then again, it’s been quite some time since it has been. I wonder why that is.
