Global Positions
“I’m not sure if she learns,” Chris tells me later. “Maybe she just accepts her fate.”
*
By the age of fifteen, my attention had begun to stray from my family’s planned destinations (partly, I imagine, due to the natural desire of any 15-year-old boy to diverge from his family’s paths in all things), and I became less obsessed with navigation than with my own wanderlust. I would flip through the pages of our new road atlas and search out the most foreign sounding and far-reaching towns I could find. Imagine traveling to the highway’s end, to the uncharted roads. Towns existed there at the road’s end: Mayo in the Yukon, Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. I knew they existed. I’d seen their names in black and white. In the map, I had seen the truth of the world: the mountainous terrain and the lowland lakes and estuaries. The copious islands and the surrounding sounds existed, too. Someone had set foot there. Someone had named them. Someone had left their borders only to return, again and again. One summer, I was invited by a friend, whose family had relocated to New London, Connecticut, to spend a few days at his home. I knew little about Connecticut, but I eagerly suggested to my father that he drop me off on their way to Michigan. He stared at me for a moment, wide eyed, and then he laughed. If I had consulted the map I would have realized that the shortest distance between two points (in this case, Philly and Detroit) didn’t pass through the heart of New London.
“Except for Canada, I’ve never been out of the country,” I told and retold my father over the years.
“Sure you have. Mexico.”
“Mexico?”
“Tijuana. Ensenada. La Misión.”
“When?”
“You were a baby.”
He would proceed to tell me stories about tourist stops and Spanish missions, storefronts and shorelines, tamales and tortas. We would page through photos. He would show me a road map of the southwest—Los Angeles, San Diego, and the crossing into Mexico—but because he had neither the desire nor the research skills to pursue a deeper understanding of cultures south of the border, my father’s knowledge was nurtured more by personal observation, intuition, time, and memory. And passed down more by oral tradition than reading.
“I don’t remember,” I would say, again reflecting on my absence in the southwest photos. While I focused on the personal, my father’s observations were more global than even he knew. His travel photos revealed this, and I’ve often thought of them as being more about landscape and architecture than the people who lived there or visited, family or otherwise.
“You were there. Trust me,” he would tell me.
*
As we head north from Florida, my wife and I see the first billboard for South of the Border just before Savannah, although we’ve heard of sightings as far south as Jacksonville. After passing two dozen billboards, we decide we’ll stop at the much-touted tourist mecca. Fifty miles later, we realize the billboards offer no context—no city, no county, no state, no distance, only colorful graphics and catchy slogans: “Chili Today, Hot…”
“It’s getting dark,” Chris observes, and I notice she is, once again, staring into the digital screen. She sits back and gazes through her side window. “More like dusk than dark, though,” she says. “Guess she doesn’t know everything.” She smirks with self-satisfaction.