Sailing Alone Around the Room

The year after I finished wandering around the northern hemisphere,  I hardly ever left my room. I went from nomad to shut-in. Either one, extreme vagrancy or extreme solitude, can do weird things to your head.

I'd fitted out my room so efficiently—desk pressed against the bed, mounted book shelves climbing all four walls—that it had a nautical feel. I often found myself thinking of my room as a boat with a desk for a cockpit, a keyboard for a helm. In it, motionless, I went pitching along through mental crests and troughs. To one wall, beneath the plywood shelves, I'd pinned a cheap map of the world on which I charted my own drift routes and those of the castaway toys and by which I sometimes navigated, trying to get the coordinates right.

The American novelist Wright Morris has an essay I like called "Of Memory, Emotion, and Imagination." He begins it by remembering his boyhood habit of spending hours beneath the front porch of a house in Nebraska, seated "in dust as fine as talcum," his "lap and hands overlaid with a pattern of shadows," peering "out at the world through the holes between the slats." Many years later, as an adult, he returns to  that Nebraskan house only to discover that the porch he remembered so vividly wasn't a porch at all but a stoop. "A cat or a small dog might have crawled beneath it, but not a child." I'm not sure we fare much better in adulthood at remembering the places we think we know, which helps explain the enchantment of maps, the impression they give that times and places can be fixed, plotted, pinned down, known.

You have to admire the confidence of maps. One of the books I took with me on my first beachcombing expedition to Alaska in 2005 was Derek Hayes's A Historical Atlas of the North Pacific Ocean, which includes a detail from Paolo Forlani's 1562 map of the world. With persuasive detail and unwavering draftsmanship, Forlani charts the Colorado River's course, from the mountains of China to the Gulf of Mexico.


I still have that cheap map up on my wall. When I look at it now, it calls to mind scenes from my travels, including many I didn't bother to photograph or write about—the parking lot of a Hawaiian Sears where I spent an afternoon in a rental car sweating out a fever, for instance, or the strange ghost exurb in the Pearl River Delta where I disembarked from a high speed ferry and found myself wandering among the lampposts and piazzas and the new but empty buildings of an office park gone bust.

My map also  calls to mind those sedentary months I spent alone in this room, months that now feel as strange and remote as the Aleutians.