The lost stories in maps

Notes on cartography and memory.

My dad restored old boats from the ’50s. He’d spend months making them seaworthy again, and while he waited for this part to ship or that paint to cure, he’d bring the work inside. Driftwood that looked like bone, verdigrised salvage, and used maps of the Chesapeake Bay.

Just a terrible, beautiful yellow I still remember.

One of those maps he transformed into our kitchen table with some cannibalized wood and epoxy resin (both cleaved off from the boat). All the anchor points and fishing holes were marked in some ghost’s loose cursive. A slender grim reaper warned of the undertow near the bridge.

That’s probably where I fell in love with maps. We seldom talked about the miles or depth — that was felt in the tiller.

We talked about the bull shark we saw last summer, the time we got trapped in the Dismal Swamp overnight, and when a whale (or a submarine) nearly capsized the boat. I’m not selling the Bay, I realize.

The map wasn’t about navigation or hydrology. It was a story for us and whoever drowned in the undertow. It was non-linear, disjointed, and haunted the present with the weight of some unknowable (but familiar) past.

That’s really what maps are, I think. They plot movement, yes, but not just physically. They’re emotional and mental courses. They link memory to the present and recreate (and misremember) the past with us. They have authors and artists and mistakes and even misdirections.

They tell us where we’ve been and what’s next (or guess at it better than we can)

John White’s 16th-century map erasing the Lost Colony,

I try to illustrate that in my own maps. Grognards and purists complain about it in blistering reviews, but I think they miss the point of the map as a story.

Maps are gross, used, decorated, re-drawn — they’re artifacts modified by the humans who use them. I wanted my map of Cynidicea to feel like that, as if it’s something you could find in the ruins.

The final map design for The Lost City

The grognards — Pelor love ‘em — often want me to include distances or conditions on my maps. I get why, but I think that cheats folks of a richer exploration. I don’t know how far the roads stretch or how deep the river is. I don’t know because roots shroud the roads. Because boats rot. Because people die and their names vanish over time.

I know the Brotherhood of Gorm ringed the citadel with a spiked palisade during the first insurgency.

I know the bridge was washed out last spring when meltwater flooded the dead canal.

I know the albino deer are overbreeding in the park. It’s growing again, thriving, and reclaiming the dead city.

And if you’re lost, follow the stars and keep moving.

—Odinson