You Are Here

I don’t drive. I have had this fact pointed out as the reason I am not very good at giving directions. Never navigating my world at the speed of a car why would I remember the exact names of street signs, or exact exits off of freeways? I wonder if, experiencing the city I live in differently than many people around me, I am in some ways living in a different city. Matthew Coolidge, founder of The Center for Land Use Interpretation, told me yesterday that earth is inert and that place is altogether a psychological space, a human condition. If no one perceives its existence than a location does not exist. Louis and Clark did not only “discover” a stretch of land that extended all the way to the Pacific, but created it in the minds of the American people. Even more fascinating is the realization that we are not all living is the same psychological location. We agree there is a “South,” for example, but not where it is entirely. Sometimes, it is as far as Maryland and Missouri, while almost never Delaware. Oklahoma is in, sometimes, because of its Confederate history. According to a survey by the University of North Carolina, “perhaps surprisingly, 11 percent of people in Utah, 10 percent in Indiana and slightly fewer people in Illinois, Ohio, Arizona and Michigan claim to be Southerners.” We also feel differently about where our neighborhoods begin and end and how cities are divided. I am not alone in geography being a matter of taste.