Chapter 10

Cartography

4/10/50 Simultaneous with material development, SSTB continues original facility function of managing practice water drops against floating target. Ballistic Cameras established on North and South Islands.

10/50-12/50 Budget inquiries made congressional sub-committee on classified material development at SSTB.

6/10/51 Rising water levels and a change in the flight path to floating target cause abandonment of North and South Island camera stations. New sites established on land west of the Sea.

Doug was in the passenger seat of Samantha’s BMW. “I want to you see something,” she said, “You can help.” They had driven out of Meridian Place but instead of turning left to get on to the highway they turned right and were heading down to the water.

“You’re going to show me something down here?”

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing down here.”

“I know.”

They came upon the old Yacht Club, something he had seen many times, but not like this. The brown dirt that surrounded it, dirt that always seemed smashed and worn out was replaced by a small sea of shiny mottled white plastic.

“What is this?!” Doug was incredulous. The landscape had the look of a British science fiction film, clean white and sterile – but not entirely white, there was brown and green mixed up with it…

“I want to show you what I’m doing.” She got out and moved to the trunk. She popped the lid. Inside was a one foot thick stack of plastic sheets. The pile was dense. Doug reflexively slid his fingers under a few sheets and found that it was too heavy to wedge his fingers in. He slid his fingers further up the pile and tried again and failed. Only when he tried to pickup just one of the sheets was he successful.

“Why don’t you pull one out…?”

Doug lifted the stiff plastic panel and was surprised by their weight and how unwieldy they were. “How can you do this?”

“I got strong. Here, bring it over here.” She pointed to a gap in one of the rows. “I always try to complete a row before I stop for the day, but I counted wrong and ran out.”

Doug dragged it over and placed as best he could in the gap. Samantha adjusted it some more then pulled four stakes out of a burlap bag and pounded them into each of the corners of the panel.

“Okay, so what is this all about?” said Doug looking on. There were maybe four or five acres surrounding the dilapidated Yacht Club already covered by panels.

“Come on, I’ll show you.” She grabbed his hand and led him to the other side of the round building. A lone Eucalyptus tree was growing alongside the building. Samantha grabbed a lower branch and started climbing, “Let’s go.”

“What are you doing? I don’t want to get killed, said Doug.”

“I’ll protect you.”

Doug followed her up the tree, continuing to climb some fifteen feet till they were level with the roof. Samantha leapt from the tree to roof of the club. “What are you doing – that roof can’t be safe.”

“I’ve been walking across this roof for two months and I’m still here.”

He watched Samantha’s sure-footedness across the broken black shingles that were intermingled with leaves, dead stuff and other unidentifiable detritus from a dead part of the world. Doug followed along behind her. “It took me six months to just paint these panels. Everything’s to scale. That was the hard part, working off a map.”

“I’m not following you.” Doug walked over the hump of the roof and he was now on the other side with a complete view of the plastic expanse. In a second the picture all came together, the splotches of green and brown and a few shades of in-between. It looked like a map.

“It’s a 1:1 scale map of this area around this building. I have another map that I started over at that deserted Navy base. Each plastic panel is painted to refer to the real topography that’s below. This is still too low really to see it properly. The scale is such that to really understand it you would need to be a couple thousand feet up. Pilots will get it, though." If there was a dip or a gully underneath where a panel lay, that particular panel was drawn with the right amount of shadow and shade to suggest that reality – but only suggest. It’s not exact. Not an exact rendering – it’s a map.”

“Okay…” Doug just stared dumbfounded.

In her mind, if it were drawn to look too real then the desired abstraction of maps would be lost. If the ground was gravel, then the panel to be laid on top would be painted brown, whereas green panels would correspond to areas of grass. The panels were to as flush with the building as possible. “If I had my way, this building would be covered too. Since buildings don’t show up on maps, I’d have to have panels mounted on poles some thirty feet off the ground, even higher to cover the few eucalyptus trees. But that’s not quite realistic.”

“Is this like art or something?”

She wouldn’t remove the road running up to the yacht club since roads are common feature on maps – and roads in real life are no less approximate (a flat uniform surface with uniform color) than the black lines drawn on a map. It was the same for the sea itself, as blue and flat in real life as it was on any map; there’d be no need to overlay blue panels on the water. Her plan was to overlay the entire area around the Salton Sea. There would be environmental concerns that she would have to address. Where her map lay would be a sterile zone where no plant or animal life could exist. She’d like the people to be out of there as well (people are never rendered on maps – the boundaries and shapes of their towns and cities maybe, never the people themselves), but she was a realist.

Samantha kneeled down and unfolded a large roll of paper showing a map of the area. The map encompassed all the land surrounding it, varying from 5 to 7 miles on either side. She was following the map. What area the map covered, she would cover. In the map’s center was the blue bean shape of the Salton Sea. She had done some calculations and determined that it would take six years at her current pace to cover the area. This did not include any lost time that would result from battles with government and property owners. If others joined in to help she could reduce that timetable considerably. The map ran from Mecca and Hwy 195 in the north down to where 86 runs right through Westmoreland in the south; from the edge of Santa Rosa Mountains in the west to the All American Canal on the West. How she would manage the small sliver of Santa Rosa Mountains is something she hadn’t figured out yet. She also didn’t know if the mountains being on an Indian reservation would make things easier or harder.

The map is not the territory. The map is perfect.

She looked up at Doug, still kneeling down on roof, her hands holding down both sides of the map. On a map the Salton Sea is made up of brown and green and blue splotches, even smooth shapes, the color their color value so rich to be edible. On a map the Salton Sea is not depressed, polluted, barren, wrecked, left for dead.

“My husband has a collection of some hundred atlases spanning eighty years. Some from different publishers, some are different editions, each one with different scales, stressing different regions, different colors, different conventions for showing topography. Some were just political maps, green for Germany, red for France, a different color for all the states. And each one was a different world. Each atlas was a different land – same world, different land.”

Samantha consults the map in her hand and compares her map with the life size job sprawled out in front of her. Close, pretty close. So much better than what it replaced. She was carpeting over disappointment and discontent, over a part of California ambushed by history. She would have to address the reality of moving the map out onto other people’s property soon. Would she ask permission or just be a marauder and start placing her map pieces on the ground. She would mask it as performance art, something like Christo would do, but on an even larger scale. No doubt there would be derision and jokes. Telling the truth would invite even more of a backlash. Alan wouldn’t care for the publicity.

She walked over to the edge of the roof looking out at the five acres of map – the only 1:1 scale map ever made. Of what use was a map as big as the territory being mapped? For the first time the map would become the territory. Samantha could hear the crunch of the debris under her feet as she walked back across the roof, her head spinning with the unbounded promise of all maps.