The Town of Valier is having an open house on March 9 to discuss our sewer and lagoon system. We seem to need to expand it all the time, though our population is shrinking. No one has ever kept a map of where the sewer lines run, so the town workers never know quite what to expect when they dig a trench. Now the state is imposing a law that the underground pipes of sewer and water must be mapped and recorded on a computer, rather than carried around in someone's head. Already we've had to call previous town workers for advice on where and what to find.
We have no storm sewer system which is a problem when deep snow makes sudden floods, though the water is absorbed quickly. The system works by gravity, which means there are areas that were once knolls so remain undeveloped because the effluent has to be pumped along by a "lift". Water is pumped up to a high reservoir, a "water tower", which is tall enough to drive the water through the entire system.
This link is to a geologic map of the Valier quadrangle. Cut and paste doesn't do it justice.
My own house is old, built on the main road down from Cut Bank which became the main crossroad with Highway 44. It is old enough that part of the line to the house is made of orangeberg, an augmented version of paper mache. The drains in the house didn't work because the sanitary stack, which is a pipe that lets air into the system, wasn't working despite being cleared. Turns out the bottom makes a sharp turn to join the main exit and it accumulates fluid, so doesn't let air in. The remedy is a valve under my kitchen sink that lets air in but doesn't let smells out. It's at the far end of the system, so when the toilet is flushed, the sink at the other side of the house hisses with intake.
This is one way to think about maps, practical, immediate, and human. Historians were trying to understand another kind of map, an old one, a bit sketchy, made by an indigenous man named Old Swan. The first problem was realizing that the Euros were used to making anything on paper from left to right but this description of the Rockies went from top of the page to the bottom, on the "margin" usually left there. One only had to rotate the paper or one's assumptions. The second problem was that it was not emphasizing the peaks, the landmarks, but rather the valleys and waterways that gave access to the interiors of the cordillera. These were what the nomadic peoples were looking for because they held water, grass and shelter. Maybe berry crops or good hunting. People can draw maps that record completely different aspects.
I used to subscribe to a magazine that always put a map on the last page, as different and surprising a map as they could find. One of my favorites was a map of all the dogs in the neighborhood, which reveals a problem when the thing mapped changes -- leaves, dies, has puppies, acquires a buddy. We think of maps as lines, borders, boundaries, but they might be areas, extents, territories, like the "beat" of a cat or a cop. This link shows the standard and persistent problem with that.
The change of sea level over the millennia has meant that coastal maps expand and contract, now hiding and now revealing, now settled and now inundated. We're about to find out what that means to us as the map of Antarctica shows that continental ice is about to convert to worldwide flooding.
A second worldwide map challenge has been the continents themselves moving on the backs of tectonic plates. Maps of Gaea show how the present continents used to fit together with each other. Their separations are radical. At the same time the magnetic north has left the previous north pole and is drifting under Siberia. We don't know why, but it screws up GPS.
There might be a map over time -- one's lifeline --which might relate to development or moving or even educational realizations and accumulating knowledge so the map is getting more complex all the time -- or is it? Might it show forgetting? Yet schools tend to teach both time and space maps as though they were permanent, unchanging. This interferes with the ideas surrounding evolution, particularly affecting the development of hominins. Even after admitting change, we want it to be linear, not a lot of rough drafts and dead-end attempts that can only be found in fossils or genetic evidence. The products of the genome is now in fragments, but the genome itself is cumulative and often records a timeline.
This is a map of part of a fly's brain.
What all this means is that when we think about human life, it is necessary to think in terms of PROCESS rather than examples, which is much more difficult. Music made a good medium until computers and video showed how math and images can record systems, variations, and interactions. Every human does this in both their brain and their body. On anniversaries of major events like birth and death, we often feel them without consciously remembering the original moment. Every human contains a family, stories, ideas about what counts. And can project into the future what might happen, what we are trying to get to, what magnet draws us, what trauma holds us back.
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