By Stan Purdum
GPS devices for bicycles are a great invention, and they are a significant help in getting us to our destination when in unfamiliar territory. But their limited screen size means that in terms of physical geography and the locations of human settlements, they don’t give us the big picture in the way that a printed map can. I pedaled my first trip across America before small, portable GPS gadgets were available, and so I relied on paper maps, and they helped me envision the larger context of regions through which I rode.
The following is a piece about maps I included in my book, Roll Around Heaven All Day, about that trip:
Although I have only occasionally been privileged to be a wanderer, wanderlust is unquestionably one of the energies that have driven my life. Raised to be a “responsible” person, I have repeatedly squelched the yen to be footloose, turning my attention instead to the routine endeavors of raising a family and making a living. And for a time, the satisfactions of those enterprises compensated for the unanswered call of the road.
I had also assumed that maturity would silence the vagabond within me, but I was mistaken. If anything, aging added a note of urgency to its voice. Once I reached my fifth decade, its cry could be quelled no longer.
As a boy on a bike cruising the roads near my childhood home, I could see only as far as the next bend, but in my mind’s eye, the highway unrolled to a distant and yet-to-be-explored horizon.
My imagination was spurred in part by a love of maps and what they represent. From the time when I first learned what a map was, I burned with a lust to match actual geography with the lines representing highways, and even more, with the blank spaces between the major thoroughfares. I still want to “own the map” — travel the terrain, see where highways actually intersect with byways, find out where side roads go, visit tiny time-forgotten hamlets, and, in general, take the roads less traveled.
The bicycle has been my frequent, and to my thinking, best implement for scratching my explorer itch, but there have been others: the car, a string of unreliable recreational vehicles, a canoe and my feet. As a young teen, I lived about four miles from a large natural park. Maps of the park showed its roads, picnic areas, buildings, waterways and natural attractions, but for some reason, none of the park’s trails. As soon as I obtained a park map, I knew I would not be satisfied until I had filled in its substantial blank areas. Over two summers, I spent numerous contented hours following every trail, figuring out my own links between them, and penciling them in on my copy of the map.
My passion to own the map is a lonely one. Though my wife and children have learned to suffer with only minimal grumbling through my innumerable “shortcuts” when driving, they do not share the joy. And they have never understood why, when arriving at an amusement park or other attraction where a map is issued, I want to walk around and get oriented to the guidesheet before queuing up for the rides. Frankly, I don’t understand it either, but there it is.
Owning the map is a fairly specific sort of exploration, in no way linked to the desire to be the first to set foot in fresh territory. Even if I had been alive during the discovery of new lands, I doubt I would have been among those who made the initial forays. But I might well have come in the second or third wave, after the first cartographers had done their work.
There’s something concrete about a map, something that anchors landscape in my mind. Nonspecific directions (“It’s the second or third road to the right, about halfway down on the left side. You can’t miss it.”) always leave me a bit uneasy (and I’ve proven that I can miss it). But draw me a map and I can get anywhere.
Owning the map is clearly not “possessing” in the usual sense. It is not holding title that counts, but knowing — from firsthand contact — what’s there. In Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote, “Journey over all the universe in a map, without the expense and fatigue of traveling, without suffering the inconveniences of heat, cold, hunger and thirst.” His words make no sense to me. A map is not a parking permit, but a ticket to ride.
Many of my youthful ideas have not survived into adulthood, but the vision of a cross-nation bicycle journey, although not always in the forefront of my attention, never fully left my imagination. Eventually, notion and imagination impelled me to make the journey a reality.
Stan Purdum has ridden several long-distance bike trips, including an across-America ride recounted in his book Roll Around Heaven All Day, and a trek on U.S. 62, from Niagara Falls, New York, to El Paso, Texas, the subject of his book Playing in Traffic. Stan, a freelance writer and editor, lives in Ohio. See more at www.StanPurdum.com.
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