My brother barely moved when I stepped over his legs and walked to the observation car. I had been dozing and watching Utah through the window, reading pieces in the Rhodia. In the middle of the notebook was "The Map-Reader," printed neatly in red ink, and to read it I needed more light than the bulb above my seat could provide.
The Map-ReaderFold by fold, the father spread the map across the width of the redwood picnic table. He anchored each corner with stones the son had gathered near the lake after they left the blue Taurus to cool in the shaded parking lot. The car did fine on the flats, but the engine overheated on extended lines of uphill grades.
“Keep your soda away from the paper, okay?”
“Okay.” The boy set the can of generic cola on a flat rock near his feet.
“You didn’t have to move it off the table, Pete. Just away from the map.”
“I know, Dad. It’s good now.”
“Here’s where we are.” The father set his little finger alongside a blue oval. “Woods Lake. Here’s the road we took down from the highway—see?” He used a different finger to trace the thin, solid black line that ran toward the bottom of the map, away from a red line that was the highway.
“How long will we have to stay here?”
The father looked at the Taurus. “I don’t know. The air’s cool, so I should be able to check the radiator soon.” He looked down at the map, spread his fingers along a stretch of red line, compared the distance between his fingers to the scale at the top of the map, and repeated the measurement several times. “Just eyeballing it, looks like we’ve covered a couple hundred miles since this morning. You hungry?”
“A little.”
“Be specific. Are you hungry, or not?”
“Isn’t ‘a little’ specific, Dad?”
“No, it isn’t. It’s general, like you’re afraid to commit one way or another.”
“Then I’m hungry.”
The father sighed. “Look, Pete. I know it has been a long day, and I know you’re tired of being in the car. I’m tired, too.”
“You make it sound like I’m trying to start something, or I’m trying to be snippy. I’m not. If I wasn’t hungry, then I’d say so.”
He looked at the boy. “Fair enough. You sandwich hungry, or carrots and celery hungry?”
The boy smiled. “Cookie hungry.”
“How about half a sandwich, then cookies?”
“If I wait a few minutes, maybe I’ll be more hungry.”
“That’s fine—we’ll wait. I think we need some more stones.” The breeze had picked up.
“I’ll get some,” Pete said, and he found a handful of stones beneath the table. As he spaced them equally around the map’s edges, his father reached into a worn leather rucksack and pulled out several large, neatly folded squares of paper.
“More maps?” Pete asked. Over the years, he had learned to assume that nearly every scrap of paper his father possessed was a map of some type.
“A different kind—not a road map.” He flipped through them and unfolded the paper, spreading it beside the road map. “This is a Forest Service map—a topographic map, or just topo,” he said. “Each map is a quadrant, and we’re on the Caples Lake quadrant. Look: here’s Woods Lake—see how it looks different here, on this map?”
“It’s the same shape. It looks the same as on the road map.”
“The same basic shape, yes. But more detailed. And all the green area? That’s the forest.” He gestured to the conifers that seemed to gyrate from the top town when the breeze was strong. “The white areas are rock—granite, from the looks of things around here. The blue lines are creeks and streams. And these brown lines that curve all over the place? Those are contour lines.”
“Contour?”
The father nodded. “They show you things like slopes, how steep the ground is.”
The boy squinted. “What are the broken lines all by themselves?” He drew his thumb along one of those lines, which started near their lake and headed into the green section of the map.
“Those are trails, for hiking. Two broken lines next to each other are jeep trails and gravel roads.”
“Some of these brown lines—the contour lines—have numbers. That’s the elevation?”
“Yep! Good work. The light-brown lines show a rise or fall of forty feet; there are two-hundred feet up or down between the dark-brown lines. We’re at about eight-thousand feet. So, if you follow this line,” he traced a dark-brown line around the map, “you’ll always be at eight-thousand feet. And when the lines are close together, that means the ground is steep.”
Pete looked back at the road map. “How much of this one do we have to drive today?”
“Most of it. If we can drive until dark, we can start another map.”
The boy looked past his father and to the lake, at a blue surface that anticipated the wind, and he wondered if there were fish there. There were poles and reels in the car’s trunk, but they had not been used in a long time.
“I’m going to check the car,” the father said. “Stay here and make sure the maps don’t blow away.”
Pete watched his father limp toward the parking lot. He turned his eyes back to the two maps and adjusted the spacing between the stones so that his thumb and forefinger spread a few inches apart each touched a stone. A few pine needles had dropped onto the paper, and he flicked them to the ground; he had learned many trips ago that not only must the maps be creased neatly and correctly, they must be kept clean. He had come to be comfortable with how things were ordered; in his bedroom in the apartment where he lived with his mother, nothing was out of place. “You’re too neat for a boy your age,” his mother had told him once.
“The car’s cooling down,” his father said when he came back and sat across from Pete. “I brought a sandwich—eat the whole thing, you get three cookies. Eat half, you get one cookie.”
Pete laughed. “What kind of deal is that? Sounds like bad math, if you ask me.”
“I was hoping you’d eat only half a sandwich so I could eat all the cookies.”
“Mom said I shouldn’t trust you, you know.”
The man considered whether the boy was kidding—and whether his ex-wife had been kidding. “She’s probably right, but for reasons other than cookies.”
Pete unwrapped the sandwich: a layer of plastic wrap surrounded by aluminum foil. His father said that this technique kept the moisture in and the heat out.
“What do you see, Pete?”
“See?”
The man pointed to the topo map. “There. What do you see.”
Pete shrugged. “Green and white, mostly. And the contour lines and streams.”
“Do you see them?”
He didn’t know how to answer. “I see the map, what you told me to see.”
“But look. You can see more than you think you can. You know about the contour lines now, how they indicate elevation. If you know this, you can train yourself to see how everything is not flat--the hills and the canyons. And you can see how steep a trail is. Not imagine, but see.”
“I understand what’s there,” Pete said, chewing as he spoke. “I can’t see what you do, though.”
“Some day, you will. It takes practice. I’ve been looking at maps for a long time. You finished with the sandwich?”
Pete had eaten half. “Yeah.”
“I’ll eat the other half.”
“Can I have the cookie now, Dad?”
“You can have all three.”
“Really?”
“Yep. I ate two on the way back from the car.”
“Maybe Mom’s wrong about you.” When the cookies were gone, Pete left the table for the edge of the lake where he shuffled across a small beach. The tall mountain on the far side of the lake seemed to be surrounded by a halo. The boy did not see any fish.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Pete said when returned to the table.
His father pointed toward a small building near the car. “Outhouse is over there.”
Coming out of the outhouse, Pete walked part way up the hill that rose in front of him. He looked to the picnic table and watched as his father folded the maps and slid them into his rucksack. The man always seemed thinner whenever Pete saw him, and now that thinness leaned toward sickly. His limp had gotten worse, too, though he never complained about his leg hurting.
“Dad?” Pete said when he neared the table.
“What is it, Pete?”
“Can I see that map, the topo?”
“We need to get going.”
“Just for a minute.”
The man reached down and retrieved the map, unfolding it across the table.
“We’re here, right?” Pete pointed to the lake.
“That’s the spot.”
“I think this is the outhouse, right here.” He placed his small index finger at a bare spot. “See—I think this is it.”
His father squinted. “You could be right.” He rotated the map. “If we look at it this way, we can get a better idea of where this picnic table is. Here’s the campground that’s near the parking lot, so you’re right.”
Pete pointed toward the outhouse. “And see this line? Maybe that’s the hill outside the outhouse door. Across the lake there’s a mountain,” he pointed to a small circle of contour lines. “I saw it from the beach.”
His father eyed the lake, tilted his head so he could see what Pete was pointing to, and he nodded. “You learn fast.”
The Taurus had cooled, and they drove to the highway then turned east. “Where are we going now, Dad?”
“Not far.”
“Be specific, Dad. Not distance—destination.”
“You’re getting to smart for me, Kiddo! I think we’ll stop in Reno, get a hotel room for the night. We’ll find a place with a swimming pool. We won’t change maps tonight.”
“Okay.” Pete looked out the window, at the mountain he had seen while standing at the beach. “Are you supposed to leave California?”
His father clicked his tongue against his teeth. “No.”
The terrain changed from granite and trees to something more barren. Pete blinked one eye at a time to make the landscape shift.
“You know why I show you these things, right, Pete?”
“The maps? Mom says it’s because you’re obsessed.”
His father laughed. “Yes, I suppose she’s right. But that’s not why I do it, not really. If you can read a map, you can do anything. If you walk around an airport, you know how to follow the signs—the pictures and the words—that’s like reading a map. Everyone has to be able to find their way around, to figure things out. To see things that others can’t see. If you go on a trip by yourself someday, you’ll be able to look at a road map for a few minutes and know exactly where you’re going.”
Pete sensed that his father had relaxed now that they were out of the mountains. The car should be okay now. “Dad?”
“Yeah,” his father said.
“How long will you be gone this time?”
His father glanced across the seat. “Why do you ask that?”
“Mom said you won’t tell her, but I want to know.”
“Your mom wants to know because she’s trying to decide if she should give up on me forever.”
“She already divorced you, Dad. That’s pretty much giving up, isn’t it?”
“That’s giving up on being married to me, and I don’t blame her for doing that. Giving up on me is something else.”
“Mom doesn’t give up easily.”
“No, she doesn’t.” He ran his finger across dust on the dashboard. “It might be three years, Pete,” he finally said. “Maybe fewer.”
“Three years. When will you know?”
“I’ve got to call my lawyer tomorrow. He’ll tell me when I’ll find out.”
“But you were innocent of everything, right?”
“Yes, mostly I was innocent. Not of everything, because nobody is completely innocent.”
“That’s not very specific, is it.”
The man hesitated. “No, it isn’t. When you get older, I’ll give you the specifics.”
“I can ask Mom.”
“I told her not to tell you.”
“That doesn’t seem fair. People ask me where you are, and I never have a good answer.”
“Who asks?”
Pete shrugged. “Friends.”
“What do you say to them?”
“I usually just say that my parents are divorced and you moved away.”
“I’m sorry about that. I should work harder at not going away.”
“If you’re gone for three years, I could have my driver’s license by the time you get home.”
“You’ll be a good driver. And you’ll know how to read a map, too.”
“I’ll take you for a drive when you come home, okay? You can navigate.”
“I’d like that, Pete.”
Pete reached into the back of the car to retrieve his father’s rucksack. “Can I?”
“Yes. You always can. I want you to take care of those maps while I’m gone. You should start your own collection, too. You need your own set of maps.”
Pete pulled several road maps from the rucksack’s pocket. “You can’t take these with you?”
“No. But I’ll be able to look at others sometimes. If the library is good, that is. Usually there’s at least an atlas or two.”
“Which map are we on now?”
“We’re still on the one on top.”
Pete opened the map and found the highway and Woods Lake. He watched out the side window until they passed a road sign that showed the mileage to Reno. “Fifty-three miles.” He drew his finger along the red line that was the highway.
“You find where we are?”
“It’s pretty easy.”
“Well, keep watching, because I’ve never been this way. We’ll have to turn north at some point.”
“I think I see where—not too far away.” He looked up at the sky. “Before dark.”
“’Before dark.’” I like the sound of that. “You think you can figure it out?”
“I think so, Dad. But I was hoping to change maps tonight. You know, drive onto another one.”
The father adjusted the rearview mirror to deflect sunlight from his face. “I’m not sure this is the day for that, Pete. Sometimes it’s good to leave them folded so you have something to look forward to.”
“We could keep driving, Dad. You’ve got a bunch of maps left here.”
The father didn’t reply, just kept his eyes on the road and on the front of the Taurus, watching for steam.
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