The Last Word On Nothing

I’m fascinated by those maps of places people have visited. You know the ones. Mine is below. You can make your own to show how much of the world you’ve traveled, or haven’t. There’s an element of bragging – why, yes, I have been to New Zealand, the Middle East, and more than one country in Africa.

But what’s so interesting about them is the lies they tell. That vast swath of red, drifting north from the U.S.-Canada border and all the way off the top of the map? The places I’ve actually been in Canada are Vancouver Island and southern Ontario. If you spend a few days in Saint Petersburg, Russia lights up from the Gulf of Finland to the Kamchatka Peninsula, the same as if you’d crossed seven time zones on the Trans-Siberian Railway, or, for that matter, lived your entire life in Irkutsk.

So shouldn’t these maps somehow degrade the marks with time? Yes, I’ve been to New Zealand, but I was 20 at the time and the memories have become blurrier and blurrier. I bought a wool sweater at an outdoor market in Christchurch and wore it for a while that afternoon even though it was December–summer–and totally unseasonable. It’s in a plastic bin in my bedroom, bulky with cables and still smelling of New Zealand sheep.

The map TripAdvisor offers seems a little more legit. That map marks cities rather than countries. I’ve been to a string of places on the eastern coast of Australia, but this map leaves the outback empty, untrodden by Fields feet. It clarifies my relationship with Canada, too.

But none of this shows how well I know a place. Oklahoma City, where I spent about 48 hours once, gets the same kind of mark as Kumamoto, Japan, where I lived and worked for two years.

Even in Kumamoto, though, I could hardly be said to know the town after only two years. I could take new walking routes and stumble across new shrines and previously unvisited convenience stores. I never learned to speak the local dialect.

A more accurate map of my travels might show every road I have driven, every public bathroom I have visited, every place I have drunk tea, every postcard rack I have perused. Up the trail would fly, lifting off from Fukuoka, reaching 30,000 feet, skipping China and Vietnam, then touching down in Bangkok. The invisible line pays out behind me, through passport control, out across a pedestrian bridge to a barely-remembered hot, bustling market in front of a temple, then back inside. Pay the departure tax, circle around various airport chairs, go down another jetway, then bounce up again, high over central Asia, touch down in Copenhagen, board a train…and on and on and on, tying together the world, wrapping around neighborhoods and people I’ve known and strangers I was too shy to talk to, like a spider spinning an exploratory line.

Here at home the line would be more like a silkworm’s cocoon, spinning around and around and around, cozy and close. But even here there is always more to know. The life stories of my neighbors, say, or what business it was that was in that space before the coffee shop. I go on long walks past barbershops and Caribbean carry-outs and parks and old, old trees, and the invisible thread pays out behind me.

I’ve fantasized sometimes about retracing my steps. What would it take to reverse it all? Not just to visit the countries I’ve visited before, but to review them in order: out to a friend’s apartment this evening; to the 7-11 this morning; to the library yesterday. Keep on going back. Each trip to Britain in the proper order. Visit the same cities in France, walk down the same roads in reverse, winding the thread into a ball on my hand and trying to remember: the next morning, did I go this way to work or that? Which way did I walk around that fountain? Did I go in the unfriendly knitting shop that day or was that a different afternoon?

But it’s impossible to undo, and I wouldn’t want to. The yarn will keep rolling out behind me. Wrapping around trees, catching on parked cars, and tying me to the whole of the world.

Photo: Shutterstock