One measure of the catastrophe was that, at the moment, the easiest thing to tackle was the old two-drawer file cabinet. If anything was bound to be disposable, surely it would be in there. They’d been through twenty years’ worth of records already and found so infuriatingly few bits and pieces worth keeping, but every page required study. She needed a quick win, something that could go OUT without so much consideration and angst.
She turned away from the eighteen milk crates and twenty-plus cardboard cartons full of books, away from the shelves loaded with rusting tools and boxes of who-knows-what, away from the trash bags full of old household linens that “someone might want,” and levered open the top drawer.
It was full of maps. Automobile Club of California maps. Dozens of maps.
Easy, right?
She started pulling them out. Like everything else, they had to go into empty boxes, boxes that had already held multiple iterations of outgoing stuff. God forbid they just hand the whole file cabinet over to 1-800-GOT-JUNK without going through it. God forbid this was the place the old man had hidden something that was actually important. They’d looked at every single piece of paper going out so far, why stop now.
Unfortunately, she loved maps. As much as she loved books, which made it harder to throw away these maps than she expected. But there were so many versions. It was as if the old man had gotten new maps every time they left the city, and had kept every single one from every single trip.
Where had they been going, and why? Did he get a new map for every county or city they’d be driving through on a given trip? Maybe so; she’d been known to do that herself. You never knew when you’d want to dive off the freeway and go exploring.
Before she realized it she’d started her own small collection of the oldest versions of each city map. As she dug deeper, as the drawer emptied, as she moved to the bottom drawer, the versions got older and older. Did she really want that city? What about this one? Why the hell was she doing this?
Los Angeles before the 405 freeway was constructed? Well, that was a frame-worthy artifact. But Santa Rosa in 1958?
Well … why not? What would happen if she actually went up there with this map? Would the city be negotiable, at all, using it?
When the cabinet was emptied, nothing “important” had been found, and she had ruthlessly cut down her own gleanings to three: the 1960 Los Angeles map, 1958 Santa Rosa, and 1954 Sacramento.
She’d never been to Sacramento. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere they’d ever been except that time they drove to Seattle. And then they didn’t stop, simply went around it and kept going.
Santa Rosa she’d been through. It was pretty much destroyed now by the ever-expanding freeways. She thought there was no chance the old map would get her anywhere; she would give it to the cousin they liked, who lived there. It would be Sacramento.
Could they go the next day? They’d been working nonstop for a week. The husband didn’t want to go. He had too much to do. The clean-out stopped when she wasn’t there, but the catching-up and the fixing-up and the dealing with a never-ending cascade of emergencies never stopped.
He was being hit with ten years of Business Not Dealt With and taking an exploratory road trip didn’t sound like fun. She should go, though. He had to go back to IKEA for a proper file cabinet, one that locked, so that the financially-revealing records that they didn’t want the rest of the family to mess around with - the family who had been in and out of the house for the last five years without mentioning, maybe without noticing, that things were going to hell - could be secured. He would take his mother’s car, and she could use theirs. When she got back she could tell him all about it. It was a day’s round trip, no more, and she’d been working like a mule. Have fun and drive safe.
Okay. She would leave after morning rush hour, and wouldn’t waste time once she got there. Not too much time anyway. She’d be home for dinner, or would call him to let him know she’d be later. There was always the chance she’d actually get lost, since her phone didn’t have GPS and the Thomas Guide in their car was ten years old. She made sure the phone was fully charged before she left.
Getting across the Bay was no more than usually awful. She didn’t love the bridge, and the highway through Berkeley was as horrible as a highway could be. She was tempted to get off and regroup on Muir Parkway, but reminded herself that she promised not to waste time. She drove on.
When she got to Vallejo, she did pull off. Did the old map cover that? Glory be, it did. Should she cheat? Should she look at the Thomas Guide to check where things matched up? Or should she trust the old map? Surely the old map’s road numbers were still the road numbers. She used the Guide to make sure that the now-freeway existed on the old map, and carried on.
She was driving outside time, through a landscape that surely bore little resemblance to its fifty-years-ago existence. Having memorized the next two turns, she got off the freeway where the old map told her to.
The next two roads were small, mostly straight, with numerous traffic signals where - she was sure - there had been none in 1954. According to the map she was still a good distance from the city. But almost out of nowhere came strip malls and shopping centers, and side streets that clearly contained housing developments. The city had come to her well in advance of itself.
The next turn wasn’t there anymore. She had to stop and pull off again, and look for a workaround route to try to find the road that used to exist. It just wasn't there. She needed a break. There was no longer a country road to Sacramento, but there was a coffee shop.
Copyright 2022 by Alexandra Y. Caluen. All rights reserved.