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Happy National Garlic Day! 🧄🚫🧛🏼♂️
Maps!
- Thread starter Edawg
- Start date
Couldn’t agree more. Your trip looks like fun already, no matter where you’re going!
The planning is half the fun, then when you're there, another slice of fun is sitting in your tent at the end of a long day looking at maps and thinking about how far you'll go the next day.
Edawg, I like your choice of map. I did a trip right there Memorial Day weekend, starting on 3rd Machias (under the lanyard of the knife) and heading up to 4th.
Edawg, I like your choice of map. I did a trip right there Memorial Day weekend, starting on 3rd Machias (under the lanyard of the knife) and heading up to 4th.
Paraphrased from Beryl Markham's West with the Night:
*****
A map in the hands of a paddler is a testimony of a man's faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader--even whose author, perhaps--must allow in his mind a recess for doubt.
A map says to you, "read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not." It says, "I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost."
And indeed you are. Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark become a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing.
Yet, looking at it, feeling it, running a finger along its lines, it is a cold thing, a map, humorless and dull, born of calipers and a draughtman's board. That coastline there, that ragged scrawl of scarlet ink, shows neither sand nor sea nor rock; it speaks of no mariner, blundering full sail in wakeless seas, to bequeath, on sheepskin or a slab of wood, a priceless scribble to posterity. This brown blot that marks a mountain has, for the causal eye, no other significance, though twenty men, or ten, or only one, may have squandered life to climb it. Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert; and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet.
Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope and sagas of conquest.
No map I have paddled by has ever been lost or thrown away; I have a trunk containing continents.....
*****end paraphrase****
Then computers and GPS came along and took a lot of the romance out of it.
*****
A map in the hands of a paddler is a testimony of a man's faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader--even whose author, perhaps--must allow in his mind a recess for doubt.
A map says to you, "read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not." It says, "I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost."
And indeed you are. Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark become a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing.
Yet, looking at it, feeling it, running a finger along its lines, it is a cold thing, a map, humorless and dull, born of calipers and a draughtman's board. That coastline there, that ragged scrawl of scarlet ink, shows neither sand nor sea nor rock; it speaks of no mariner, blundering full sail in wakeless seas, to bequeath, on sheepskin or a slab of wood, a priceless scribble to posterity. This brown blot that marks a mountain has, for the causal eye, no other significance, though twenty men, or ten, or only one, may have squandered life to climb it. Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert; and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet.
Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope and sagas of conquest.
No map I have paddled by has ever been lost or thrown away; I have a trunk containing continents.....
*****end paraphrase****
Then computers and GPS came along and took a lot of the romance out of it.
“A plague upon it! I have forgot the map.” - Shakespeare
“All you need is the plan, the map, and the courage to press on to your destination” - Earl Nightingale
“All you need is the plan, the map, and the courage to press on to your destination” - Earl Nightingale
I’m planning my first “North Maine Woods” trip soon, this one will be exploratory, learning the lay of the land, does and don’ts. Lots of places to explore on the map and this book has been helpful also.
Looking for solitude, a nice campsite or two and maybe brook trout in my cold handle.
Looking for solitude, a nice campsite or two and maybe brook trout in my cold handle.
That does poetically capture the elegant simplicity, yet completeness, of a paper map. Many a spring trekking adventure would initially take place the previous winter, the map spread out on the dining room table while cold, snow, and ice would be outside the dining room window.
Yeah, I was an aerial surveyor out of school. Started as an old school cartographic draftsman, then aerial camera operator and eventually an analytical compiler of GIS and other computer map products. The field changed so much from the advent of GPS that I went back to school and changed careers at 38 years of age. The photogrammetric surveying field is still around, but vastly different, with fewer firms. Still a geographer at heart, I appreciate the work put into a good topo map. I wish I had been more in the moment when flying around Arizona in a small plane. It was the most fun I had at a job after all these years. Can't say my 2nd career was 1/10 as satisfying.
"For you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone, cause the times they are a-changin'."
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