There’s something beautiful and mysterious about compass roses. They play a significant role in the upcoming book, Delivering 2nd Chances. However, they are used as a crude graffiti tag, thereby reducing their beauty and overall significance. That’s what happens when an unruly breakdancer named Zed gets a hold of someone else’s design and a few cans of spraypaint.
Maps also hold a fascination, at least for me, that is no doubt lost to the current generation that has never been made to search through atlases in search of specific geographic highlights. Or maybe they did have to. My children did in their homeschool; there was an entire subject and books of maps devoted to the study. Still, I believe my original assertion that most of the joy has been lost to GPS telling us where to go so that we may arrive at our destination in good time.
I appreciate GPS. It does reduce a certain kind of stress that we all used to have when given verbal or written instructions on how to arrive at a house, business, or landmark. Within an advanced metropolis, you might have been given directions involving merging into a lane in order to make a right and cross a bridge because if you didn’t do so, you would remain on the wrong side of the river. These instructions might have also involved cardinal directions, which meant you had to have visual landmarks to orient yourself by. The mountains or the ocean or the river might have been your orientation point–mountains naturally being the most visible of these at any given time.
In less advanced metropolises, such as Socorro, New Mexico, directions became a bit more bizarre. In the early days of living there, there were few street signs to by, although M Mountain was to the west and the Rio Grande valley to the east. The freeway ran north to south parallel to the main drag of town, California Street. These were important directions to know. My directions for one house I lived in was to drive west toward M Mountain. When the paved road ends, take a right hand turn three dirt roads down. There is a large, ugly pine tree in my front yard, just past the empty lot.
Now that I live in Roswell, there isn’t a prominent mountain or interstate to orient oneself by. Instead, one tends to consider the Walmart being on the far north side of town, while the airport is on the far south of town. The airport is not actually in Roswell proper, but it feels like it is because of its location near the community college. Main Street runs north to south, while Walmart is to the west of Main and the mall — across from Walmart — is to the east. I’ve described Roswell before as being one long alien landing pad because it’s a long town in the middle of grasslands. If you fly out of Roswell, you can see this visually. It can also be seen from a tall building, of which, there only a few.
The Petroleum Building is one such that pretends to be tall. When they were renovating, I walked in and climbed the stairs and looked down at the green swath in the middle of bare yellow grasslands that is Roswell. It helped me appreciate this little town. I know I’ve written about this before, maybe even in my “I ❤ Roswell” post. I don’t know; I just know it was a turning point for viewing this once hated place in a new light. I wanted my beautiful mesas and mountains and desert scape with jackrabbits and marigolds and cactus blooms back.
This post was brought to you by my recent editing changes in my book. I hope you have enjoyed this little talk about directions. If you need directions somewhere, I’m more likely these days to give you cardinal directions rather than, take a left at the large stump by the chicken coop where Our Lady graces one corner and holds birds in her arms. That last was a real physical detail of Socorro; it still is. Drive past Our Lady of the Chickens I used to say. Eventually, you will find my house. Or not. Once upon a time, I didn’t have a cellphone and neither did many other people. Calling and asking for help was not an option. Find a burned-out trailer, knock on the door, and hope it’s a meth-head instead of a zombie who answers. That was your best bet for finding your way. In those days.
Jill Domschot 