Notes on a Wandering Cartographer

He has drawn the same valley eleven times in forty years, and each map is wrong in a different, deliberate way.

The first was a survey. The most recent is closer to a memoir: paths that no longer exist, marked because somebody walked them; a spring that dried in 1998, marked because somebody drank from it.

A map is an argument about what matters, he tells me, and every argument dates. His answer is not accuracy but honesty — a legend that admits its own affections.

I ask which version he would give a stranger. He laughs and says none of them, then folds the newest one into quarters and hands it over anyway.