Two truths and a lie

When I worked in the restaurant industry, there was quite a bit of turn around. New people coming in, filling spaces of other people revolving out (or promoting themselves to guest as it was sometimes said). With this ever changing group of people coming and going, learning about the new people and trying to find connections became an important way for the older staff to feel comfortable with the new, and vice versa. The game that we played most often, when sitting around a large table at our shift meetings before the nights mayhem began, was called Two Truths and a Lie. Basically, the new person would have to tell two fantastical yet true thing about themselves, and one lie. The rest of the table would have to decipher which fact was actually not true. Inventiveness was important, as well as remembering strange and fascinating things that one has done with their life, but in the end it spurred conversations about history, personal narratives, and quirky sub cultures.

With this idea in mind, here are two truths and a lie... in no particular order.

1) I like to drive around trying to get lost.

2) I don't really believe that most places have an importance.

3) Maps are the only real way to understand the world outside us.

Basically, this structure just gives me a forum to describe and discuss topics that I find interesting and worthy of further space. With that being said...

One of the things that I love the most is getting lost. Actually, the thing that I love the most is getting myself un-lost. For some time I had a Jeep Wrangler, and I would love to take it out on the roads of southern Indiana. Two lane roads that swooped and curved, dipped and dragged through fields of corn and soybeans, the way the grasses grew high, thick and green between the paved road and the drainage ditch running parallel to the blue highways, the distinctive color of the pavement and earth in Indiana, and forever trying to drop myself into a part of the state that I had never been just to find how exactly I could get myself out: these were how some of my best days were spent.

I would play a game of finger pointing. I would take a map of Indiana, close my eyes, and point to the directory that listed all the cities, towns, and villages. Budda, Indiana. That's today's destination. A quick glance at the quickest way to get there aside, and I was on the road. I would often take Interstate Highways to get to the destination the quickest way possible so that I could meander my way into the thicket and grasses that were the highway system of southern Indiana. Counting the WPA irrigation ditches and train bridges were just part of the games that I would play.

Always keeping a close internal compass, I would mark every slight movement southwest or northeast so that I knew exactly which direction I was traveling. This helped when coming to intersections with other highways, checking for odd or even numbers to confirm the direction that I wished to be eventually traveling. And sometimes I went out of my way on purpose, dragging myself deeper and deeper into the the Lost, mostly because I knew the next town away and I didn't want the game to end so soon, or end so easily. I may have been trying to be lost, but I had my bearings so I was never far from found.

Funny thing happened. I drove around so much that I had a hard time getting lost anymore. It became harder and harder to trick myself into the game. And I just knew that if I continued down this road, I would hit 45 or 46, which would lead me to 135, which I followed to the 252, then back to the 135 all the way to Meridian street and Indianapolis. And I didn't want to be found sometimes, even if it was myself that was finding it. I even tried going north once, but my time spent in Muncie, Indiana at Ball State reminded me of the grids and roads that spanned that part of the state and I was soon in the same situation. Found. And that is no place to be if you want to be Lost.

So I've been reading a bit recently about this idea of a Sense of Place. Lucy Lippard, Yi-Fu Tuan, Marc Auge, Miwon Kwon sort of stuff. Ya know, the good stuff. And what I'm beginning to understand is that this Sense of Place (or SOP) is subjective, just as memory, history, mapping, and a billion different other things including your favorite flavor of Kool Aid and your mother’s cooking is entirely subjective.

Kwon argues, at least as much as I’m beginning to understand, that we need to create stronger ties to a place, we need to be deeper, we need to spend time and experience and history into a place in order for it to resonate within us, and therefore create a SOP. It’s time and investment. And creating something that ties an individual, the place, and the memory together. This is becoming more and more difficult in a time when humans are more and more inclined to move than stay.

Added to this mess is the detachment that individuals now have with place. Movement and mobility have created such a separation from a place that it is difficult for any of us to really have any connection to the places that we reside anymore. People shuttle from one town to another, butterflying in for a few years here before moving to a similarly saccharine neighborhood there. And soon, times and lives have been spent not creating a unifying relationship between an individual and the place that they reside, but a universal disconnect between the individual and any place that they may reside in the future. Why is this house or this parcel of land important to someone if they are merely going to move away in a year or three? Why assign importance to a place that will be replaced soon anyway.

And this is why I don’t really believe that any place has a significant importance. At least not to me. There are places, I know, that have importance. The house that I grew up in and still return to when I visit, my grandparents home in Evansville where we spent Christmases and Thanksgivings crammed in the basement lining up for one, huge communal feast among family. But mostly I remember and cherish events and motions, trips and newness, times trapped in a car and the relationships that were bonded in those spaces. Truck rides to obscure fishing holes with my dad, road trips to New Orleans with college buddies, trekking around the country camping and watching, observing the whole world lay flat in front of me, trying to walk along the bricks of the Berlin Wall as it crossed the busy streets near the Brandenberg Gates, bicycling along rice patties in rural southern China. These are the moments with places that are of importance. But almost if not all of these moments are in transit, and all of them are fleeting, and all of them I cannot, in any way, recapture, I can only recreate.

The place has marched past me, the dirt has gone, the earth has moved. Or I have not stayed enough to lay track to it. And therefore it has no real, visceral, actual importance to me. Maybe that will change, but as I am addicted to motion and the road going under my feet, my sense of place is constantly flowing past in a flurry of dust and concrete, grass and sky. I know I will have to lay claim at some point, but when I do I hope it's not too far from the road...

And this whole business with maps? They just lie, man. They don’t tell you about the colors, they don’t describe the smells, they don’t allow you to see the world moving past you in fluid streaks of greens and blues. They are stuck in time. They are the past. They are subjective. They reek of last week's satellite imagery and not this week's experiences. They are old, man. They are done. A constant and ever-present reminder that what was decided to be important to you today was last year's importance. Or last months. Or last weeks. They emphasize the visual over any other sense. But it's a visual that is averaged, cliched, and based down to it's lowest common denominator. Maps don't show sunsets. You can't watch the wind shimmer and whisper through a grove of saguaro on a map, only by the real experience of the desert. There are things that you must only learn alone, when you get yourself lost and try to find your way out. On your own and without a guide.