Travel, maps, and memory

As Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, a place I had visited enough times to no longer count them as individual visits, I was wandering around Amsterdam for the first time in my life. Back at the hotel room overlooking a canal, watching TV images of canals breaking and floodwaters rising in the French Quarter, I found myself remembering not the images of places in the city, but the map of the streets criss-crossing the areas I knew first hand.

It occurred to me then that the way I remember places I've been was peculiar. Planning the next trip to another new place, Amelia Island, has me thinking again about travel, maps, and memory.

I love travel. Not just new places, but the journey itself. Being in motion, going somewhere.

My reaction to travel is independent of the length of the trip or the distance to be covered. What makes travel so enjoyable for me is the possibility of something new and unforeseen happening. Something that will set one day off from another so well that even years later, I will remember another time and place.

Of course, there is a curious contradiction here: the more I travel, the more difficult it is to reconstruct with precision when I had a memorable day.

The airports and their procedures blur together (even as they become ever-more baroque in a doomed attempt at perfect security). Over the years, I have lost the nervous feeling that used to hit on take-off and landing. Recently, I have found myself developing more anxiety just before I travel, as I worry that something critical will be left undone. But travel itself is routinized and I am living each trip as a repetition of something now basically familiar.

The experiences of place that follow routine voyages still stand out in memory. But they are set free from their moorings. They stand out like isolated gems, or strings of pearls. Yet, they are not without anchors in time and space.

I sometimes spend time with maps, retracing itineraries. Seeing the map reminds me of the place. Seeing the place made the map memorable for me originally. Where other people use photos, I use maps.

And even though I no longer can count on remembering what year I visited each place, the sequence of voyages seems to remain clear. (I have to say "seems": absent something like my experience of New Orleans' drowning as I first committed the map of Amsterdam to memory, how can I be sure my sense of sequence is right?)

I find myself committing each new place to memory in part through contrasts and connections to previous places. Places I love are connected by the trees-- individual trees-- I saw, or the rocks cut through along the highway. Places I remember are layered on each other with these features tying them into bundles.

And over all of them are the maps, and the itineraries traced like lines across their surface. The whole a globe with scribbles dense in spots, empty in others.

Off to draw some new memories of place.