Not all who wander are lost.
–J.R.R. Tolkien
Before venturing to the outer reaches of Noxubee County last week to visit Charlie Dahlke’s farm, I took my “Mississippi Atlas & Gazetteer” and made an enlarged photocopy of page 39. You know the books, the red oversized atlases dedicated to a single state.
On the subject of grafting fruit trees, it would be difficult to find someone more knowledgeable than Charlie. Self-taught and obsessive, he is a font of knowledge on the subject. Charlie’s place (Doxubee) is in a part of the county where signs are few and it’s not unusual for a road to suddenly turn from paved to gravel and then back blacktop again.
“Put this into your GPS,” he said, before giving me his address on Paulette Road. Only thing is, I don’t have GPS.
As it happens a friend emailed me last week a 2014 story in the “Paris Review” on the 90th anniversary of Rand McNally’s first published road atlas, the “Rand McNally Auto Chum.”
I’m not sure how helpful the “Chum” was. This was the pre-Interstate days and roads then had names not numbers. The Chum had no index for towns. And, interestingly, there seems to be no images out there of the Chum, not even on the Rand McNally website.
I’ve always loved road maps, ones you can fold up and put in your glove box. I like the word “chum” too, but, like the road map, it seems to have fallen out of favor, at least when referring to a friend. The ghostwriter responsible for the Hardy Boys Mysteries used the word liberally. Remember Frank and Joe Hardy’s chum, Chet Morton?
Used to be the oil companies printed maps, and you could get them free at gas stations. Now state welcome centers are the only sources of free maps. You can still buy laminated versions in convenience stores and truck stops for $6.95 or thereabouts.
While GPS (Global Positioning System) has its place — most of the smartphone set seems dependent on it — I’ve remained stubbornly opposed to the idea. A map provides context; it gives you the big picture.
While we’ve found any number of obscure restaurants and coffee houses in unfamiliar cities with the help of Graham, the guy with the English accent inside Beth’s smartphone, he’s led us astray, too. Like the time we ended up staring at a wooded lot at the end of a dead end road in Summerville, Georgia. We were looking for Paradise Garden, the home of the late Howard Finster, the visionary folk artist.
The thought of getting lost causes great distress for some. I’m not sure why. It’s not a permanent condition, and, if you take the same attitude as did Mr. Tolkien, it can be an adventure.
A map is a way to better know a place. Study the plan of Manhattan, for example. (Rand McNally’s first automobile road map published in 1904 was of New York City and vicinity). Most of Midtown is laid out on a grid. Broadway begins in lower Manhattan and angles across and up the West Side. Look and see names you’ve heard forever: Hell’s Kitchen, Murray Hill, Kips Bay, Little Italy, Upper West Side, Harlem, Greenwich Village, the Hudson River, the East River … A map shows you how the puzzle fits together.
According to the Rand McNally website, stores sold out of its map of Europe within 24 hours of the 1939 German invasion of Poland. A map was a way to begin to understand what exactly was going on.
Turn to facing pages 22 and 23 in the “Gazetteer” and you find yourself in the heart of the Delta. Look south of Clarksdale on Highway 61; there’s Bobo, Alligator, Duncan, Huspuckena … just below Duncan we find Bugga Bottom Road. Falcon, Darling, Tippo, Rosedale. How could all that not result in music?
And then, a bit farther south, on page 35, there’s the setting for the story about Willie Morris driving the back roads of his native Yazoo with Eudora Welty. They passed a sign marking Paradise Road, whereupon Willie suggested they turn onto it.
“We’d be fools if we didn’t,” Eudora replied.
There’s lots to see on the back roads in our mostly rural state (Alabama, too). Get your hands on a good map, call a chum and get out there and wander about. To echo Miss Welty’s sentiments, you’d be a fool not to.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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