Without a Map

“It’s not down on any map—the true places never are.”
(Herman Melville, Moby Dick)

A job offer in Minneapolis kept me busy this weekend, scouring ads for a new apartment and packing up the old. But in the midst of the whirlwind such a transition kicks up, I paused preparations for a final pilgrimage in Boston.

My destination was not marked on any map that I could find, and in the end I left my apartment on foot with a backpack of picnic snacks, a pen and notebook, but no map. I was determined to find the base of what I call my “fairy tower,” a mysterious white spire topped with a sea green turret that chases me on my walks to work and dodges and dances on the horizon each evening when I return home. I have seen that tower from every point in this city, but have never found it.

As I left my apartment in Jamaica Plain, I peered anxiously at the horizon, waiting for my goal to appear in front of me. Usually it would show up, slightly to the right of Stop n’ Shop, hovering over the Jackson Square T station. Today it was gone.

“When the rainbow disappears, the leprechauns still remain,” my husband, companion for the trek, mystifyingly assured me.

And he was right. We followed the Southwest Corridor Parkway around the corner of Jackson
Station, and there was the tower, perched high on an embankment of houses and autumn-tinted trees, with no clear path leading to the top.

Keeping our goal in sight, we crossed the traffic of Columbus and came to a stop: a Y in the road. We chose to go left, though soon we were cutting right on a series of labyrinthine switchbacks that led us up the hill, past haunting mansions in decrepit states of disrepair, and a life-size, slightly creepy statue of Christ perched on a large rock at the corner of an empty lot, hands outstretched as if to bless our pilgrimage.

As we climbed higher, now and then I would catch views of the city and surrounding neighborhoods: the Prudential and John Hancock buildings marking downtown, the white blight of the Vet’s hospital I pass every day on my way to Brookline, the dome of the abandoned church down the street from my apartment. The monuments of my life in Boston were beginning to shift behind me, uprooting from their chronological anchors in my habitual every day to move on the tides of elusive memory.

Soon after we passed Jesus, the tower appeared around a bend, first its bleached trunk with winking slits of windows, then its whole, but we still had to climb a steep bank of sharp rocks to reach our goal, finally firmly rooted in the center of a green square.

As I circled the tower I craned my neck, trying to see into the dark windows beneath its peak. A seagull flew by, perhaps with a message for a captive princess in its beak, but the windows kept their secrets, reflecting only the cloud-dappled sky. We sat down to our picnic fare beneath a weeping willow crying the golden tears of autumn. I knew I had come to say goodbye.

In life there are no maps, only the ever-shifting unknowable future. But that future is anchored in place, in destinations which we can come to know and love for the moment that we inhabit them—or is it that they inhabit us, because even as I set out on my next journey, I feel this place inside of me; Boston now a captive of my memory.

And because you still need maps to most places, we’ll still have a vibrant travel section at Booksmith to help you get to your next destination. My co-worker Natasha, who has been buying back your books in the Used Book Seller, will be managing our travel section in my absence. A veteran traveler, newly returned from Tokyo, and queen of two geography bees, in 4th and 8th grade, she’ll be there to guide you on your next journey. Safe travels.

To Go or Not to Go?

"This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes a part of the tangible world." --Freya Stark

It's been on my horizon for over three years now. Ever elusive, whimsical, charming, it rises over the peaked roofs of my neighborhood as if out of some other world, a fairy tale perhaps. Up until yesterday it was, in fact, just that: my fairy tower, a mystical white tower topped with a green peaked turret, the kind that Rapunzel let down her long hair from. 

What made it even more magical, more unreal and other-worldly, was the fact that it used to dance enticingly over the horizon, ever-shifting, never-stable. Walking home from work it would appear out of nowhere over the treetops, from a new angle, in some new light; it seemed impossible that it stayed where it was while I moved. I'd think of Marcel Proust, who often wrote of the shifting steeples over a horizon in central France, until they became metaphors for his characters: ever-changing, never who you thought they were. I'd try to guess the purpose of my tower--Minaret? Mosque? Lookout?--but I'd never look it up. I never tried to find its base, half-believing it moved continually in its own reality, and half-content to let it be, evidence of a dream world more compelling than my every day reality.

Yesterday a gentleman approached the register and informed me that I would not have made this sale had not his bus been late. The comment gave our transaction a kind of fated appeal, as if it were meant to be. As I bagged his books, he informed me that he was taking the "66 to the 39" a familiar bus route for me, in fact, my bus route home.

Had I ever heard of the Roxbury Water Tower, the customer wanted to know. I didn't think so. "They're doing some construction on it now, so it doesn't look the same, used to be white." Suddenly I remembered that in recent weeks my fairy tale tower had changed, had been magically transformed into a brown tower. I had imagined some evil spell had been cast; now I knew the spell was scaffolding.

The customer drew a photo-copied map out of his bag, and began to explain his trek to me. As I became more and more certain that this man was on the journey I had never dared to make, on a pilgrimage to my fairy tower, and that this was the treasure map to its elusive base, I grew more and more alarmed. Dared I look at the map? Learn the roots of this tower, the truth of this story? It seemed I had no choice. "Oh," I said weakly, "I always wondered about that tower."

"Yup, it's a water tower," the man confirmed, and informed me that were rehabilitating the tower, that they hoped to open it so that the public could go to the top to enjoy the view.

Would it have been better not to know? I wondered as I watched the man leave the bookstore to continue on his quest. According to Proust, the places we long for are never quite the same in reality; it's the essence of their mystery, the very appeal of desire itself that we crave, and rarely find fulfillment when we journey to their base. His narrator is almost always disappointed in the destinations he has dreamed.

However, in my limited travel experience, I often find that there is joy in the journey itself, and perhaps my imagination is not quite so ardent as Proust's: it rarely over-shoots a destination, allowing me to be quite happy at the end of a quest. It's one thing to hold a destination as sacred, it's another to keep it--untarnished, but un-experienced--at arm's length, in another world. There's something to seeing in reality something you've only imagined. When the Roxbury Water Tower turns white again, perhaps I will set out on a pilgrimage of my own. Who can tell what worlds I'll spy from atop it's turret?