The Presumption of Maps

Last week I was traveling to a small city with a “Shanty Vegas,” a trailer park said to deal in meth and sex, close by several gaming parlors and a church in a former car dealership. Abe Lincoln crossed the river there with his family as a young man. It was all for a story. I had an appointment.

Maps told me to get off the highway an hour too soon, as there was construction or an accident ahead. It offered a route faster by ten minutes, which always sounds good at the time. I assumed it would take me around the slowdown and put me back on the biggest roads, but I should know better. More than once the app has shunted me off onto odd, even dangerous, routes, sometimes in the middle of the night; apparently its pride in knowing overrides common sense.

This time it pointed me down a series of county roads with numbers not names, and every turn was a new number: Right and straight and left and straight and right and left and right and left. The mean direction was correct. I passed three or four hamlets with a few houses and a church; a set of grain elevators with a couple of houses kneeling at their feet; a trio of shotgun shacks with agri-industrial machinery rusting in the yards, which I could not even guess at what it did. The landscape was flat and green with remnant-clusters of woods from the original savannah under a protective sky. I saw almost no cars or people in an hour of travel.

Maps did not know a county highway was closed for repair, so I had to dead-reckon down a gravel path between crops, take an unknown road east, then another back north, and rejoin the original route. You are on the fastest route, the app continued to insist. That was some consolation for no gas, food, or bathrooms.

Even now I cannot recreate most of my route by looking at the map. I remember the town of Hord. What’d they do with the E?, I said to a friend. (She might as well have asked what they did with the A.) I was on Nighthawk Lane for 22 miles, surely the worst road in America, three-foot concrete segments that were cupped and gapped. The vibration at every attempted speed gave me a headache and shook loose a skid plate under my car. (Once the universe begins offering weirdness, it does not stop easily: later, when I was home again, a tortoiseshell cat instantly tried to take up residence between the loose skid plate and my engine.) I passed Calfkiller Creek, Stringtown Catholic Church and cemetery, a “German” town hall, the Embarras, and finally the Wabash rivers.

It was the kind of area where my incomplete understanding, which should lean to comedy, was not tragedy either, not emptiness or absence, but presence without meaning. The issue for me was not the landscape’s ruralness. I grew up in a place and time so quiet I still marvel at the memory of it. The issue is what is down there below the surface of narrative, the intimation of the eternal.

I got a little problem with that, I have realized.

“[The] double exodus of man and beast left the plain a desert, green or blossoming indeed, but almost as forsaken as the Siberian Obi,” Melville writes in “John Marr.”

“Save the prairie-hen, sometimes startled from its lurking-place in the rank grass; and, in their migratory season, pigeons, high overhead on the wing, in dense multitudes eclipsing the day like a passing storm-cloud; save these—there being no wide woods with their underwood—birds were strangely few. Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie.”

This stillness—which I have seen many times on my drives, from Pennsylvania to Arizona—is one-half of a different version of divided America: in this case, the seemingly empty versus the busy presentness of mid-American cities with suburban rings such as St. Louis and Chicago. I begin to think I see the roots of something reactionary, regressive, in its quietude, a fear of not-so-distant problems, such as the scourge of meth.

Ideas come to you in places like this: that you could love and be forced to carry it without corresponding safety or return. I try to stay centered, relaxed, but ready to receive blows for my presumption. Call the willingness to continue to encounter the blank world compassion. After all, I too go by odd names, have machinery that no one knows what it does, and wish for some peace if not understanding.