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they rise from it, the details of the ground diminish, draw together, and disappear. The land becomes a map of itself.”1 By juxtaposing and contrasting the terms “land” and “map,” Berry implies a crucial point about mapmaking as a technology and about the relationship of that technology to both the landscape being depicted and the experiences and ways of life of the people who live on the mapped ground. The map is not the territory; any exercise in mapping requires acts of selection and simplification in order to convert a particular landscape into portable and legible graphic form, and as a result certain details get highlighted and others get left out. Thus, as Berry’s traveler rises into the sky, “land” becomes “map”: the rich and complex San Francisco landscape loses detail, resolves itself into its most visible largescale features, and, through the frame of the airplane window, becomes a static thing that looks like it belongs in an atlas, a far cry from the ground-level view of the city and its environs as residents and visitors know it, an abstract image giving no hint of the true color and incessant movement of the ocean, the height of the hills, the species of the trees. Thus if the writing of a McPhee or a Moore is one way of getting a landscape or seascape down on the page, using the sensibility of the author or of a set of characters to simplify the scene and thereby make it both comprehensible and meaningful, cartography offers another way of translating the tangled, textured surface of the I n Wendell Berry’s novel Remembering, a character looks out of his airplane window as he leaves San Francisco, and Berry describes the view: “Afloat in fickle air, laboring upward, the plane makes a wide turn out over the ocean, and heads inland. . . . As f o u r “A Labyrinth of Errors” Thoreau, Cartography, & The Maine Woods QR Thoreau, Cartography, & The Maine Woods 97 world into a form that people can easily read, one that brings with it intriguing qualities and problems of its own. As a particular kind of print medium, maps occupy an interesting middle ground between nature and culture. They are humanly constructed artifacts that depend for their public acceptance on their perceived fidelity to the physical details of the earth’s surface. While even the familiar and precise quadrangle maps produced by the U.S. Geological Survey cannot actually duplicate or reproduce the landforms and vegetation in the places they cover, the more “natural” these maps are, the better — the more accurate, the more scientific — they are seen to be. At the same time, though, those same maps pound the landscape flat, meld the complex composition of a forest into a single shade of green, freeze rivers and oceans in one place regardless of rapids or tides. They have a strong basis in nature, but make the land over into an abstraction, a symbol system. Thus it seems that maps, like landscapes themselves, represent an inextricable blending of the earth’s nonhuman surface with the transforming force of human thought and action . Dependent on nature, they remain irreducibly cultural. Still, while the sort of distance and effacement of detail represented by Berry’s loftyairplane — wherebythethicklytexturedworldoflocallifeandexperience becomes replaced in the visual field by large landforms and broad spatial patterns — is common in most maps we see today, it is not necessarily inherent in the nature of maps, but only in maps as they are conventionally produced in the modern world. And perhaps no American writer knew this better than Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau took three trips into the forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains of northern Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857, thereby establishing himself as what John McPhee has called “in all likelihood, the first tourist into the Maine woods.”2 If not the first, he certainly hasn’t been thelast,andinwritingabouthisexcursionsinthreeessaysthatwerecollected and published posthumously under the title The Maine Woods in 1864, he also located himself at the head of a long tradition of not only traveling through but writing about the region as well, a tradition that includes John McPhee’s own book The Survival of the Bark Canoe, published in 1975. In addition to his journeys and his writings about those journeys, though, what may be most interesting about Thoreau in the Maine woods, and most intriguing in light of our discussions of how natural landscape and cultural process can mutually inform each other, is the...

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