Speaker 1: Hussel stilly os the map maker.
Speaker 2: In a room at the top of a spiral staircase,
Speaker 2: in a building that leans slightly to the left, there
Speaker 2: is a man who draws maps. His name is Edmond,
Speaker 2: and he has been drawing maps for longer than most
Speaker 2: people have been alive. The room is small and round,
Speaker 2: with a single window that looks out over the town.
Speaker 2: From up here, the town looks like one of Edmund's maps.
Speaker 2: The rooftops are geometric shapes, the streets are lines, the
Speaker 2: parks are green patches, and the people are tiny moving
Speaker 2: dots that wander between them. Edmond often looks out the
Speaker 2: window and thinks about how strange it is that the world,
Speaker 2: when you see it from abive, looks so much like
Speaker 2: a drawing of itself. His desk is made of oak
Speaker 2: and is older than he is. It was his father's desk,
Speaker 2: and his father's father before him. Three generations of map
Speaker 2: makers have sat at this desk, drawing the world in
Speaker 2: ink and careful lines. But Edmund is the last. He
Speaker 2: has no children, and there is no apprentice, and when
Speaker 2: he is gone, the desk will be just a desk
Speaker 2: and the maps will be just paper. This thought does
Speaker 2: not make him sad, It makes him careful. He draws
Speaker 2: each map as if it might be his last, with
Speaker 2: the precision and a love that goes beyond what the
Speaker 2: work requires. He does not just draw roads and rivers
Speaker 2: and boundaries. He draws the feeling of a place. The
Speaker 2: way a particular street curves gently to the left, as
Speaker 2: if it is in no hurry to arrive. The way
Speaker 2: a park sits in the middle of a block, like
Speaker 2: a green oasis surrounded by stone. The way a river
Speaker 2: narrows at a bridge and widens again, as if the
Speaker 2: bridge is something to be cautious about. To day, he
Speaker 2: is drawing a map of the town, not because any
Speaker 2: one asked him to. He has already drawn dozens of
Speaker 2: maps of the town, one for each decade, and each
Speaker 2: one is slightly different from the last. Streets are added,
Speaker 2: buildings are removed, Parks grow or shrink. The town changes slowly,
Speaker 2: like a living thing, and Edmond's maps record those changes,
Speaker 2: the way a diary records the passage of years. He
Speaker 2: dips his pen in ink and draws a line. The
Speaker 2: line represents a road, Mill Street, which runs from the
Speaker 2: old stone Bridge to the town square. He has drawn
Speaker 2: this road hundreds of times, and he knows it by heart.
Speaker 2: He knows where it dips slightly in the middle, where
Speaker 2: the old elm tree once stood before the storm took it,
Speaker 2: where the cobblestones give way to asphalt. He draws each
Speaker 2: of these details, because details are what make a map true.
Speaker 2: The ink is due, dark and fine, made from a
Speaker 2: recipe that his grandfather invented. It is a mixture of
Speaker 2: lamp black and gum arabic, and a tiny drop of
Speaker 2: something else that Edmund has never been able to identify.
Speaker 2: His grandfather took the secret to the grave, and his
Speaker 2: father never learned it, and Edmund suspects that the ink
Speaker 2: is simply ink, and the secret is simply patience. But
Speaker 2: he keeps the heat.
Speaker 1: Recipient a lot drawer just in case.
Speaker 2: As he draws, Edmond listens to the sounds of the
Speaker 2: town below, the clatter of horse hoofs on cobblestones, though
Speaker 2: there are no horses in town any more, and he
Speaker 2: realizes the sound is coming from his own memory, projected
Speaker 2: onto the present like a film. He hears children laughing,
Speaker 2: the ring of a bicycle bell, the distant call of
Speaker 2: a vendor selling something he cannot quite make out. These
Speaker 2: sounds are the picture of the map, the life that
Speaker 2: fills the lines. There is a knock at the door,
Speaker 2: Come in, Edmond says. The door opens and a girl
Speaker 2: steps inside. She is perhaps twelve years old, with dark
Speaker 2: hair tied back in a ponytail and a notebook clutched
Speaker 2: to her chest. Her name is Rose, and she comes
Speaker 2: to see Edmond every week. She wants to be a
Speaker 2: map maker, she says, though Edmund is not sure that
Speaker 2: map making, as he practices, it is something that can
Speaker 2: be learned from a notebook. Good afternoon, Edmund, Rose says,
Speaker 2: settling into the chair across from his desk. She always
Speaker 2: sits in the same chair, and she always places her
Speaker 2: note book on the same spot on the desk, as
Speaker 2: if by repeating these actions she is making the visit
Speaker 2: more real. Good afternoon, Rose, Edmond says, what shall we
Speaker 2: talk about to day?
Speaker 1: Scale?
Speaker 2: Rose says, immediately, how do you decide how big to
Speaker 2: make things? Edmond puts down his pen and thinks this
Speaker 2: is one of the questions he likes because it does
Speaker 2: not have a single answer. Scale is a choice, he says.
Speaker 2: When I draw a map, I have to decide what
Speaker 2: matters If I draw everything at the same scale. The
Speaker 2: map would be as big as the world, and it
Speaker 2: would not be a map at all. It would be
Speaker 2: a copy. So you leave things out. I leave things out.
Speaker 2: But the art is in knowing which things to leave out.
Speaker 2: A good map shows you what you need to see.
Speaker 2: A bad map shows you everything, and you are lust
Speaker 2: in the detail. Rose opens her note book and writes
Speaker 2: something down. She always writes down the things, Edmond says,
Speaker 2: as if she is afraid she will forget them. Edmond
Speaker 2: finds this touching and slightly alarming, because he is not
Speaker 2: sure his words are worth preserving.
Speaker 1: What about the things that change? Rose asks, how do
Speaker 1: you draw something that is not the same from one
Speaker 1: year to the next. Edmond looks out the window. He
Speaker 1: can see the square below, where a fountain sends a
Speaker 1: thin stream of water into the air. The fountain was
Speaker 1: built twenty years ago, and before it there was a
Speaker 1: statue of a man on a horse, and before that
Speaker 1: there was nothing but open space where people gather to
Speaker 1: sell things and argue about politics. Everything changes, Edmond says,
Speaker 1: that is the nature of the world. But a map
Speaker 1: does not need to capture every change. It captures the
Speaker 1: feeling of a place at a particular moment. The map
Speaker 1: I drew of this town in nineteen seventy is not wrong.
Speaker 1: It is simply a snap shot of nineteen seventy. The
Speaker 1: map I draw to day will be a snap shot
Speaker 1: of to day. Both are true, Both are useful, They
Speaker 1: are just true in different ways. Nods slowly. She writes
Speaker 1: something in her note book. Can I see the oldest
Speaker 1: map you have? She asks.
Speaker 2: Edmund reaches into a drawer and pulls out a rolled
Speaker 2: piece of paper. He unrolls it carefully, placing small weights
Speaker 2: on the corners to hold it flat. The map is old,
Speaker 2: the paper yellowed, the ink faded to a soft brown.
Speaker 2: It shows the town as it was sixty years ago,
Speaker 2: when Edmond was a boy. The streets are the same mostly,
Speaker 2: but the buildings are different. There is a mill where.
Speaker 1: The library now stands. There is a field where the
Speaker 1: school is. There is a river that runs through the
Speaker 1: center of town, long since buried in a pipe beneath
Speaker 1: the asphalt.
Speaker 2: Rose leans for board and studies the map with wide eyes.
Speaker 2: There is a river here, she says, pointing there was,
Speaker 2: Edmond says, the mill stream. It ran right through the
Speaker 2: town square in the spring when the snow melted, it
Speaker 2: would flood the market. The vendors would stack their crates
Speaker 2: on tables and wade through the water, still selling, as
Speaker 2: if a little flooding was nothing to worry about. What
Speaker 2: happened to it, they buried it. In the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 2: they decided the river was a nuisance, so they put
Speaker 2: it in a pipe and ran it underground. They paved
Speaker 2: over it and built the square. Rose looks at the
Speaker 2: spot on the map where the river used to be.
Speaker 2: She traces its path with her finger, from the edge
Speaker 2: of town to the square and beyond a thin blue
Speaker 2: line that no longer exists. That seems wrong, she says,
Speaker 2: it does. Edmond agrees, but that is what happens to rivers.
Speaker 2: They get in the way of progress, and progress wins.
Speaker 2: A map maker's job is to remember the things that
Speaker 2: progress erases. He looks at the map, at the thin
Speaker 2: blue line that was once a river, and he feels
Speaker 2: a quiet sadness that he has carried for sixty years,
Speaker 2: not for the river itself, but for the way it
Speaker 2: was forgotten. People in the town walk over the pipe
Speaker 2: every day and never think about the water flowing beneath
Speaker 2: their feet. They do not know what they lost, but
Speaker 2: Edmond knows his maps.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: He rows up the old map and puts it back
Speaker 2: in the drawer. Then he picks up his pen and
Speaker 2: dips it in ink and continues drawing the new map.
Speaker 2: He draws the square with its founting, and he draws
Speaker 2: the streets and the buildings and the parks. And then
Speaker 2: in the bottom corner, where no one will see it
Speaker 2: unless they look very carefully, he draws a thin blue
Speaker 2: line and labors it mill Stream underground. And he underlines
Speaker 2: the word underground three times, as if to make sure
Speaker 2: the world will not forget again. Rose watches him do this.
Speaker 2: She does not say anything. She just writes in her
Speaker 2: note book and nods and understands. The afternoon light fades
Speaker 2: and the shadows lengthen across the desk, and Edmond and
Speaker 2: Rose sit together in the round room at the top
Speaker 2: of the spiral staircase, surrounded by maps, drawing the world
Speaker 2: as it is and remembering the world as it was,
Speaker 2: and making sure that neither one is lost