The subtitle of In the Memory of the Map is "A Cartographic Memoir," which succinctly depicts the subject of the book. I have been fascinated by maps for much of my life, ever since I was a young boy. For me they are conduits to, and expressions of, memory. When I look at a 1966 Chevron road map of California, a partly blank map of Arctic Alaska's coastal plain, or a map of the area surrounding the Wyoming fire lookout where my family and I spent parts of seven summers, I am pulled into other times and places. Maps carry their own, solid presence, as well as the enigmas of the past; they "point us toward a world we might know," as well as toward another world, the one we once knew. . .
From the Introduction to In the Memory of the Map: "I believe - desire to believe - that the air is full of maps, the very air alive with them. I sense their presence everywhere, in the wash of my own history, in the lives of others. I hear them in the thin songs of migrating blackpoll warblers that drift through the late May maples, songs given out on some glorious morning by birds on their way north from Central America to their boreal breeding grounds. I touch them when I run my hand over a piece of water-smoothed Redwall Limestone somewhere deep in the Grand Canyon and feel the faint impression of a three-hundred-and-forty-million-year-old nautiloid, suspended in the deepest well of time. I smell them in the rich and acrid odor of buckbrush and chinquapin and manzanita, which rise from the sun-pounded California chaparral, and in the memory of how the scent of baby shampoo lingered in the hair of my young son and daughter after their evening baths. . . .These maps are with me always. They trace the path of my days, point toward possible futures, carry me out of the past and into the present. They are as much a matter of neuron and neurotransmitter as ink and paper. And so I unfold the maps of my life and plot my meandering course: a cartography of memory, intellect, dream and desire. It's what I have, this way through the world."