Live in one place for your whole life, and you won’t realize about the map. It’s ingrained. Familiar. Constant. You don’t have to think about where it came from: you simply don’t think about it at all.
Your head map. Drawn out, refined, sometimes redrawn, inch by inch, with everything you experience, every place you go.
It’s like living in a house with uneven basement steps for years: one day, without any fanfare, your feet find their way, and, after that, there’s never a toppling surprise in the fact that just one tread is for some reason an inch lower than all the rest.
I had a big head map in St. John’s — heck, a big map in most of eastern Newfoundland. No wrong step there could ever fool my foot and send me plunging.
And then we were in brand-new Saskatoon.
Saskatoon started, for me, as an absolutely clean slate, with every trip anchored firmly by our Caswell Hill house.
Having headed out from that house in one direction, to one specific place, I’d learn not only how to get there, but the route in reverse as well. Building paths, remembering them. Tamping them into place.
And Saskatoon is an exceptionally well-designed city: from here to there is remarkably predictable. When we arrived, good friends drove us around the neighbourhood and showed us, in particular, the unusual few streets near us that didn’t conform to the grid. The streets that actually ran on a diagonal.
Soon, it was as familiar as the back of my hand, a map stretching out beyond the city and into the big sky.
But Winnipeg is different.
I’ve known Winnipeg for years, coming here to see family and friends, so that in a way, many parts are familiar — the only thing is that I’m realizing that I don’t know how any of those disparate pieces actually connect together.
They’re islands.
There’s a reason for that.
It’s a driving city, moreso than any I’ve ever been in. And because my wife Leslie lived here for years and knows it so much better than I do, when we’ve come here, I was always a passenger, rather than the driver. She knows implicitly what speed to take to hit every Portage light squarely on the green. She knows the missed lane changes that will strand you far downstream.
Because of that, I know individual spots in the city quite well: well enough to recognize individual stores and houses, streets and turnoffs.
But I have no real grasp of the whole — and it’s a big whole. Hands off the wheel, I have never been able to link the parts I know together cohesively. There are a welter of places you can’t turn and routes you can’t take during rush hour, though you took them only hours before.
Sometimes, the signage just seems to suggest you aren’t going to be able to get there from here.
Sometimes, you can’t.
There are streets that head east and then bend north for no particular sensible reason: thoroughfares that end suddenly and leave you to your own devices while traffic spools around you. You drive into a whole royal family of similar street names, the royalty caring little for the struggles of a commoner.
There’s a good reason there’s a place called Confusion Corner.
So I’ve been driving.
But in an odd way.
I’ve been taking a variety of straight lines out of the city, far out of the city, as if I was creating the great long anchor lines you find in spider webs.
I think I’m building a framework to fit together all of the little city-nodes I already have locked up in my head. Trying to connect the Exchange District to Langside. Sweeping down from St. Andrews and then jinking to Sherburn. Finding, against all odds, the Pancake House for coffee and breakfast before I starve.
It’s a completely different experience from anything I’ve ever had to do before, and the steps are much more deliberate.
Out, back, paying attention all the time, if not to street names than at least to the tilt of the sun and the pop-up downtown that may suddenly shadow-puppet any available horizon.
I’m getting there.
Soon, I’ll start knitting in the little spiderweb drop-lines, the small lines and arcs that build the final mesh and draw the anchor lines into a single, complete picture.
Sometimes, I think that the simple lines I’m creating to connect Point A to Point B are like dendrons, tiny nerve corridors connecting an essential nucleus here to an essential nucleus there, building, creating, stitching an interrelated whole.
In a way, like recovering from an unexpected and unrecognized injury.
Piecing it together. At the same time, fascinated by the process.
The new whole of where you are.
Nice one.