Taking Off (26 page)

On our trips to West Burke, whether we were on our way to Vermont or New Hampshire, my grandmother did the navigating, and I remember well how she struggled to control a huge, ungainly map, on which the routes were laid out in a code of width and weight and color that indicated their place in the hierarchy of roadways. That, I thought, was the kind of map I needed.

In those days, one could have maps for free from local gas stations (which were not yet billed as service stations, though that appellation and the diminishing level of service that it was meant to mask were just around the corner). Since my father worked at a gas station, I could get maps there, of course, but the station stocked only maps of New York and contiguous states. Those would not be enough. I wrote to the company that owned my father's station and supplied him with gas, and I received maps of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. I stapled them to the walls of my room, along with my maps of New York and New Jersey.

While I was studying them, the thought occurred to me that wind and weather might drive me off course, make me drift. I would need maps of the states north and south of my route. I wrote for those, and when they came I added them to the walls of my room, and when I had filled the walls I tried taping some to the ceiling. The ones on the ceiling sagged and billowed, and their corners came unstuck and curled downward. After struggling to keep them flat and fixed, I persuaded myself that I liked the billowing and curling, and I allowed them to billow and curl as they would.

Studying these maps as I did, whether standing at the wall and leaning in at them or regarding them from my bed with my hands clasped behind my head, I made my trip to New Mexico many times before I ever left the family driveway. I felt in imagination the surge and lift of my winged mount beneath me. I saw my flightless coevals, the nation's little groundlings, below me, watching and waving, wishing that they could be me. I saw America's yards and farms laid out like patches in a quilt. I saw it all as others said they had seen it. I was seeing it at second hand, but still something of it came from me—all the pretty girls, to name just one example, sunbathing in their yards, waving at me, beckoning to me, blowing kisses. After a while, I began to fear, as I suppose all armchair travelers do, that the actual journey would be a disappointment, and, little by little, the thought occurred to me that the maps might not be accurate.

“I got these maps from the company that owns my father's gas station,” I said to my friend Spike, “but I'm worried about them.”

“You're afraid that they'll fall on you while you're asleep and smother you?” she suggested.

“No,” I said. “It's not that. It's—look at the way the mapmakers vary the thickness of the lines that represent roads and highways, and the way they use different colors.”

“Very nice,” she said.

“But—suppose they make these maps in such a way that they tend to lead the traveler astray?”

“Astray?”

“I mean, what if they lead people to their gas stations?”

“What?” she asked.

“All the gas companies make maps like these and give them out at their stations, right?”

“Right.”

“Suppose they make the roads going past their stations look more attractive or more interesting, so that people will choose those routes and won't choose other routes, where the gas stations that sell other kinds of gas are located.”

“You're nuts,” she told me.

“Maybe,” I admitted.

To test my theory—and Spike's, I suppose—I wrote to other gas companies. I compared their maps' depictions of the roads along the route that I intended to follow with the version offered by the company that owned the station where my father worked. I imagined traveling the routes that the maps depicted, and tried to decide whether I was being steered toward each company's gas stations. After many long hours of thought experimentation, I came to the conclusion that the maps could not be trusted—and, simultaneously, I discovered that the trip so often taken in my imagination had grown stale.

So I refreshed the trip that had grown stale by deciding to travel without a map. Why travel with a map that you've decided you can't trust anyway? I took all the maps down from my walls and ceiling, folded them up, and put them away in my closet.

Having no map forced me to ask directions of strangers, and along the way I learned that doing so leads to fascinating exchanges, exchanges that are, more often than not, useless, but fascinating nonetheless. If I had it to do over again (in actuality, not in memory, as I am doing it now), I think I might travel with a map. I've decided that they're more trustworthy than I thought—and they are much more trustworthy than the advice of strangers.

THE PERSONAL HISTORY, ADVENTURES, EXPERIENCES & OBSERVATIONS OF PETER LEROY BY ERIC KRAFT

(so far)

Little Follies

Herb 'n' Lorna

Reservations Recommended

Where Do You Stop?

What a Piece of Work I Am

At Home with the Glynns

Leaving Small's Hotel

Inflating a Dog

Passionate Spectator

On the Wing

Eric Kraft has taught school, written textbooks, and was co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He was the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He lives in New Rochelle, New York, with his wife, Madeline.

www.erickraft.com/peterleroy

TAKING OFF
. Copyright © 2006 by Eric Kraft. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Author's notes: The illustrations on
here
and
here
are adaptations of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of
Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn't particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile. The passage from
Antique Scandals
here
is a fabrication; as far as I know, no such book exists. The photograph
here
is from
Elements of Aeronautics,
by Francis Pope and Arthur S. Otis, copyright © 1941 by the World Book Company. The page from
Impractical Craftsman
here
is an adaptation of a page from the August 1931 issue of
Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
The advertisement for Dædalus Welding
here
is based on an advertisement for Hohner Harmonicas that appeared in the September 1937 issue of
Modern Mechanix.
“Build a Power Saw from Scrap Parts”
here
is based on an article in the May 1936 issue of
Modern Mechanix & Inventions.
The frontispiece from
Elements of Aeronautics
reproduced
here
is, in fact, the frontispiece from
Elements of Aeronautics.
Peter's conversation with the neighborhood character known as Baudelaire
here
is based on a passage in Baudelaire's
The Painter of Modern Life,
translated by Jonathan Mayne, and the photograph of the neighborhood character is in fact Nadar's 1863 portrait of Baudelaire. Except for those credits above, all illustrations have been cobbled together by the author from clip art and his own photographs.

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First published in the United States by St. Martin's Press

First Picador Edition: July 2007

eISBN 9781466886728

First eBook edition: October 2014