Column. The world today seems increasingly destination-challenged with each passing year. Familiar and durable old grids of established geopolitical ties have buckled and bowed out of shape. Old addresses are gone, as are the avenues leading to them.

(Back to Articles.)

A World Needing Map
by Charles Strohmer

When I first moved to a rural area in the Midwest, I suddenly became destination-challenged. Gone was the familiar big city, and with it a predictable grid system of streets that you'd need to be pretty thick to get lost in even if you were lost. Now I didn't know where I was. The topography was hilly and there were no maps that I could find of the countless backroads that wandered the hills like lost souls.

Maps wouldn't have helped. Many of these backroads had no street signs. And when the locals would offer directions—I frequently asked—sometimes I thought they were pulling my leg. To reach one destination, I got the following directions: Take the highway to Chamber's Market, turn left, go about 3 miles and make a sharp U-turn at the Gator Point sign, follow along aways and turn left where you see a pie plate stuck to a tree. We're at the end of that narrow road." True story. I found the place because a pie plate had been nailed to an old scrub pine.

But I shouldn't complain. In my files I've got a World Press Review story from July, 2002, in which journalist Oakland Ross described what it was like trying to get around in the Central American capitol of Managua. On December 23, 1972 a massive earthquake had pretty much reduced the city to rubble. Twenty thousand people had died. Also gone was the city's old grid pattern of streets, giving a whole new meaning to locating things for the remaining two million Managuans. To get around proficiently they devised their own cartographical substitute. They use landmarks: a certain tree, a pharmacy, a plaza, a soft-drink bottling plant, a child welfare agency. In the words of the Chamber of Commerce vice-president: "We have an amusing little system that no one from anywhere else can understand."

One visitor to the lakeside city found the woman to whom she'd been sending letters (from Canada) at the following address, which went on the envelopes: "From where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua." Though this made for efficient mail delivery, it opened up whole new worlds of imponderables for visitors. How would you know where the Chinese "used to be," or which way was "down" as opposed to "up"? Since the terrain often precludes seeing the lake, how would you know that direction, and what if the yellow car happened to be out for a spin? It drives people nuts who first arrive there, say residents, because they don't know what we're talking about. Somehow, Ross notes, the people who live there have managed, with practice, to figure it out.

I'm not sure this can be said of the world today, which seems increasingly destination-challenged each passing year. Familiar and durable old grids of established geopolitical ties have buckled and bowed out of shape from the violent underground energy of terrorism released upon our cities. Old addresses are gone, as are the avenues leading to them. With former patterns and their predictable results over the cliff and with others buckling, why are we still trying to get around by reading the crumpled street signs? We live here. But we aren't figuring it out. And it's going to take more than a pie plate nailed to a tree or an amusing little system.

I'm not talking about just about relations between Europe and America and the Muslim Middle East. People have been profoundly moved not just by the events of 9/11 but by ramified subsequent international events and actions. Our world seems to be losing its faith in human beings. And when that happens, where does a human being go to find a map of meaning and hope?

(Back to Articles.)