In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes...

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes. I bargained for salvation, she gave me a lethal dose. I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn.

--Bob Dylan

Mapping a territory according to its history is something I’ve learned to do over time. Growing up, a typical vacation with my family involved a trip to Southern California by car, with my father driving just under the speed limit. What made the time pass painlessly was his running narrative about the history of the California he grew up in during the 1940s and 1950s. I would never have known it then, but his stories created California for me—the way I see it now is still as a place of desert eccentrics, migrant laborers, Okies, and the odd farmer selling oranges from the back of a car on dirt roads off the highway. It is the place where fathers and sons build homes together and the boys run off to join the Marines, where they fight about Nixon and take color pictures of each other standing in front of cars.     

It is his California, constructed around the world as he knew it. When it comes to Riverside, Los Angeles, and Orange County, I understand them not as a megalopolis but a network of small towns stitched together loosely with thin roads, then then braided together for keeps with a highway. Everything is anchored to greater L.A. (As I get older, I realize it is not just his, it is also the California of Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel West.) The bedroom communities that sprang up in service of the larger urban centers—the wealthy neighborhoods plastered along the hills off the highway, the places created because the beach towns were getting too rich—basically don’t exist for me even now since they are outside the history I learned as a child. I know they are there, of course, but they don't really exist.

For me, California is a place in time. Many years removed from those trips with the family, I’m convinced that I have a type of synesthesia that forces spatial-chronological associations in my mind. In other words, history is a place. If you say “1978” to me, there is a box of 1978 in my head and inside are Reggie Jackson, punk rock, Pope John Paul I, and Battlestar Galactica, all things I put there that year. I’m wondering if this is how I map territory as well.         

And as a place, history can be mapped. In preparation for this week, I tried to remember a trip taken through the Midwest that was never completed as planned. Struggling to remember the details of place, I could only come up with an impressionistic map of the Midwest that looks like this:

Spencer, Iowa. Day one of the mission. Arriving in Spencer, Iowa, with a cheap little suitcase stuffed with two suits, a pair of shiny black shoes, three changes of underwear, and a bible tote. I use a picture of a girl for a bookmark. They tell me I’ll be there for at least two months but that first night I calculate how long it will take to walk home. At least two months, probably.

Little town in South Dakota. A Saturday night in late October, somewhere even smaller than Spencer. There is a family on stage and they are large people, the mother in ruffles and a long black dress encircled by three teenagers, all singing hymns in a high lonesome with their eyes closed. My companion giggles because he thinks it’s off-key. It’s not. It’s beautiful. The next family tells “Jokes from the Bible” using homemade puppets and sign language. They get a few laughs.

Inside the infernal apartment. Halloween evening sitting inside, afraid some kids will knock at the door. My companion tells stories about his girl. She looks like the girl in my bible.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota. With the car heater on full blast and a diabetic behind the wheel, I almost die in a Ford Fairmount. Luckily, I know how to steer a car from the passenger seat. Learned that playing highway games on I-10.

Salvation Army store, Spencer, Iowa. Laundry day, two months in. At the back of the Salvation Army store, they sell books. On the Road costs fifty cents. While my companion looks at shoes, I put a dollar on the counter and put the book in my coat. It’s cold outside. The coat is a gift from my best friend to keep me warm in the Midwestern winter. His grandfather’s coat, It kept him warm on his return to Germany from Russia in 1944. Probably not the only German coat in Iowa. That night, I bring the new book with me into the bathroom—the only room I can be alone in. Reading the first chapter, I realize my mistake and leave for home two days later.  

That was 26 years ago. Those places are still there on the map. I guarantee it.