I have a map. A cheap small, slightly untrustworthy map from a car rental company in the middle of San Francisco that, for the last year or slightly more, I have plotted my walks on. I may have mentioned it before, I can’t remember. I may have meant to, but shied away in the knowledge that it displays some of my more obviously compulsive tendencies, but really, it’s not that bad. It’s not every street I walk on a daily basis, catalogued and annotated. THAT would be completely nuts. This? This is just Anna-level crazy. It only has the walks that I’ve purposely taken as WALKS - the urban exploring, and stairway-finding and hikes around the city that I’ve been doing, on and off, since I got here.
I only started recording them on a map halfway through being here, of course. Before that, when we were having lots of lovely visitors, and taking them exploring around the city, I walked the same routes several times over - the easiest way from here to that particular tourist attraction, the fastest route from that tourist attraction to the hill with the great view over the city, the gentlest way from that hill home again, these sorts of things.
Once I started drawing on my map, I found myself purposefully making sure that each time I wanted to get from this X to that Y, or that A to the same old B, I would turn a different corner, walk a different street to get there, and find yet another on the way back.
It gives a purpose to my route. Not just one of seeing a certain thing, or reaching a certain destination, but making the individual parts of the exploration just as important. Setting foot on each street and saying “I’m almost certain I have never, ever set foot on this street before” makes each individual part of the city a place of constant newness, no longer how long I stay or how familiar the whole becomes.
When I get back, I plot out my route - first usually on this google-maps pedometer thing, which lets me know how far I’ve gone, how high the hills, how many calories one might burn doing such a thing, all the statistics, and I save that somewhere, and then I take out my map, and draw the same thing onto it - a real, physical evidence version - on paper - of the thing that just happened in the real, fast-moving world. I like physical things, as little as I want to clutter my life with them.
But little things like this are ok.
This is my map.
It’s changed since I took that. It’ll change again in the next week, most likely. I like the way it marks out the places in the city I walk the most, and the ones I still need to cover more purposefully. The patchiness of North Beach, Nob Hill and Russian Hill (top right corner of the city) bothers me. I’ve walked all over that part of town but often on the same well-trodden roads, and simply walking it to cover the rest in purple would, trust me, just mean slogging up, down, up and down the same three or four hills over and over and over again.
It’s most purple in the area where I used to live, and even more so around the neighbourhood I live now. I love the way you can see the ridiculous loops of where I’ve, usually in an extreme of good or bad mood, taken myself off for a dozen-mile pounding of pavement and not come back until my knees were begging me to stop (or generally a couple of miles after they started requesting quite urgently that I think about it).
I know without thinking too hard, which areas will be more covered by the time we decide to leave the city, and which ones will remain basically empty. I like having it as a record - and mostly, I like the patterns it makes.
Trying to think what to do with it the other day - it’s only a thing, after all, it’s only worth keeping if it’s useful (or beautiful) I think when we do leave the city to live somewhere else for a while, I’ll trace the pattern of the roads walked - just those, with none of the rest of the business around it - and use the pattern as the basis of a screenprint, or an embroidery, if I could get good enough to do it.
That way, you see, it’s like a snail trail. Like one of those time lapse photographs of car headlights and taillights blending into long streams of colour and painting a map of city streets just by moving through them.
Or sort of like that, anyway. Just much, much slower.
I love coloured in maps, but the only time I really do this is on ski resort piste maps. At the end of every snowboarding day we sit down, usually armed with a beer, sometimes at our accommodation, sometimes in a bar, and we unfold our designated colouring map and get out the highlighted pen. It feels like a sense of achievement watching the map get more and more coloured in :-)
Comment by Jane — 24 August, 2010 1:01 pm
It looks a bit like the kind of thing you would draw on an etch-a-sketch… lots of straight lines with some occasionally wiggly bits where you get inventive.
I think those paths, blown up really big, would make a great feature wall in a future house of yours.
(And speaking of ski piste maps, a friend of the family once used all the piste maps that she had collected over a number of years to wall paper her toilet. I think that’s quite cool.)
Comment by Clair — 24 August, 2010 1:15 pm
Oh my! This is beautiful, with the greens and purples and tiny variations in the lines.
I keep something a little like this on Google My Maps for my neighborhood in LA, drawing lines on where I’ve been so I can make up new dog-walking routes (http://jeweledplatypus.org/pixels/screen/mymap-small.jpg) - but it’s not really as fun or flexible as a paper map. I’ve never seen a one-page paper map of my area, but I could probably maul one together with some Google Maps screenshots… And I actually made a paper map with drawn-and-painted walking trails once - of San Francisco! - but it was more about impressions than data (http://jeweledplatypus.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/text/summermapbook.html). The record-keeping, yes!
I find that keeping track of my paths like that really improves my sense of direction - and my understanding of how the city is put together. It’s like manually geotagging things on Flickr - you have to carefully zoom around and figure out where you were, which helps cement the map into your head. (At least for me, without much of a native sense of direction.)
I’m going to be moving back to San Francisco soon, and I think I will grab one of these cheap paper maps and my running shoes and a marker and get to work…
(And an embroidery sounds appropriate, walking a needle and thread across a surface! Would probably take forever, though, but ideally a good kind of tedious in the same way that long walks are the best kind of tedious.)
Comment by Britta — 24 August, 2010 1:58 pm
I love going for walks too, but I never thought of plotting them out on a map. What fun! It really appeals to my sense of orderliness and besides, I like paper maps very much. Thanks for the idea!
Comment by pinklea — 24 August, 2010 5:24 pm
Comment by anna — 24 August, 2010 9:27 pm
Aw thank you. My bookbinding class was amazing, and I wish everyone could take one like it. But it’s all fancypants to haul out the watercolors and tracing table and arcane paperfolding techniques; I also really like the immediacy of the free map + drawing. I think I may use a colored gel pen for my upcoming version, so I can trace one skinny line per walk and let the lines build up.
I carried those one-page maps inside a notebook during each of my three summers in SF, a new map every time, and it would have been interesting if I’d kept track of my paths during each summer - so I’d have three pieces of paper with different experience-records on them.
A related thing: Aaron Straup Cope has made “piratemaps” that draw out streets people have visited based on their geotagged Flickr photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/4383380280/ - with variations at http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/tags/piratemaps/
Comment by Britta — 25 August, 2010 12:53 am
It would make the perfect cover to the perfect walking guide book… as offbeat and quirky as the blog, quintessentially Brit and irreverently local. Have you thought about this?
Comment by Hannah Chá — 25 August, 2010 4:24 am
Comment by anna — 25 August, 2010 5:24 am
Hehehe! makes sense, since I got here from Tom Taylor’s Delicious bookmarks, and people seem to be all well-connected. :]
Comment by Britta — 25 August, 2010 2:23 pm
I don’t think it is too crazy. I’ve often wondered what a map of Amsterdam would look like if I marked all the streets I’ve walked.
Comment by Invader_Stu — 26 August, 2010 6:34 am