Christopher Rowe - Another Word for Map is Faith

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ANOTHER WORD FOR MAP IS FAITH, by Christopher Rowe

The little drivers threw baggage down from the top of the bus and out from its rusty undercarriage vaults.

This was the last stop. The road broke just beyond here, a hundred yards short of the creek.

With her fingertip, Sandy traced the inked ridge northeast along the map, then rolled the soft leather into

a cylinder and tucked it inside her vest. She looked around for her pack and saw it tumbled together with

the other Cartographers’ luggage at the base of a catalpa tree. Lucas and the others were sorting already,

trying to lend their gear some organization, but the stop was a tumult of noise and disorder.

The high country wind shrilled against the rush of the stony creek; disembarkees pawed for their

belongings and tried to make sense of the delicate, coughing talk of the unchurched little drivers. On the

other side of the valley, across the creek, the real ridge line—the geology, her father would have said

disdainfully—stabbed upstream. By her rough estimation it had rolled perhaps two degrees off the angle

of its writ mapping. Lucas would determine the exact discrepancy later, when he extracted his

instruments from their feather and wax paper wrappings.

"Third world bullshit,” Lucas said, walking up to her. “The transit services people from the university

paid these little schemers before we ever climbed onto that deathtrap, and now they're asking for the

fare.” Lucas had been raised near the border, right outside the last town the bus had stopped at, in fact,

though he'd dismissed the notion of visiting any family. His patience with the locals ran inverse to his

familiarity with them.

"Does this count as the third world?” she asked him. “Doesn't there have to be a general for that? Rain

forests and steel ruins?"

Lucas gave his half-grin—not quite a smirk—acknowledging her reduction. Cartographers were famous

for their willful ignorance of social expressions like politics and history.

"Carmen paid them, anyway,” he told her as they walked towards their group. “Probably out of her own

pocket, thanks be for wealthy dilettantes."

"Not fair,” said Sandy. “She's as sharp as any student in the seminar, and a better hand with the plotter

than most post-docs, much less grad students."

Lucas stopped. “I hate that,” he said quietly. “I hate when you separate yourself; go out of your way to

remind me that you're a teacher and I'm a student."

Sandy said the same thing she always did. “I hate when you forget it."

* * * *

Against all odds, they were still meeting the timetable they'd drawn up back at the university, all those

months ago. The bus pulled away in a cloud of noxious diesel fumes an hour before dark, leaving its

passengers in a muddy camp dotted with fire rings but otherwise marked only by a hand lettered sign

pointing the way to a primitive latrine.

The handful of passengers not connected with Sandy's group had melted into the forest as soon as they'd

found their packages ("Salt and sugar,” Lucas had said, “They're backwoods people—hedge shamans

and survivalists. There's every kind of lunatic out here.") This left Sandy to stand by and pretend authority

while the Forestry graduate student whose services she'd borrowed showed them all how to set up their

camps.

Carmen, naturally, had convinced the young man to demonstrate tent pitching to the others using her own

expensive rig as an example. The olive-skinned girl sat in a camp chair folding an onionskin scroll back

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Christopher Rowe - Another Word for Map is Faith

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