Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A is from the book Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt. Passage B is from the short story "The Open Lot" by Barry Lopez.

Passage A by Hali Felt

My mother used to draw maps. Not in the cartographic sense-she had no training in that field—but

rather in the sense that she rendered them, drew and painted and inked up sheets of paper depicting areas of land that she had studied. She spent hours at the library poring over atlases in the reference section, photocopying in segments the huge pages of the books, then taping them together so she'd have something to work from at home.

She liked to complain about all the research she had to do to create even the smallest map. This made sense; as a freelance magazine illustrator, the time she spent on research went largely uncompensated. But she had to do it if her maps were going to meet her editors' approval, and I think it was actually her favorite part. I remember waking up in the middle of the night when I was little and stumbling in my bare feet to the other side of our apartment. I could hear the soft laugh track of whatever she had on the television to keep her company while she worked, and as I got closer to her studio I could see the electric light spilling out of it, as if daylight had arrived a few hours early in just this room. And there she'd be, all splayed out on her studio floor, the copied maps spread out like a carpet and a pencil between her teeth. When I found her on these nights, she'd almost never be looking down at the maps or at the television. Instead, she'd be staring off into what would have been the distance if her futon, her flat files, and her dresser hadn't been in the way. I thought she must be thinking about mountains or maybe even plains, and the borders between countries that could shift if she allowed even a tiny tremor in her hand to travel down the wood of her pencil, through the lead, onto the paper. Her illustrations were always meticulous, though; looking at them, I found it obvious that she reveled in all the necessary detail.

While she also drew other things, I latched onto the maps without any urging. As a kid I sent away for an orienteering manual that taught me how to navigate through the wilderness with only a map and a compass; as a teenager I bought journals and calendars with maps printed on them; and when I moved away from home, I decorated the walls of my bedrooms with maps. I, too, loved how beautiful they were, the grids of the streets, the curves of rivers, the green amoebas of parks and forests(1)—maps were true, but they were also art, a starting point for me to imagine what they represented, what they meant, what was actually on the ground.

Passage B by Barry Lopez

Jane Weddell took any of several routes from her apartment on West Sixty-fourth Street to the museum on West Seventy-seventh, depending. Her path was determined by a pattern of complexity outside her thought, the result not solely of her emotional state but also of her unconscious desire, say, to avoid a wind blowing black grit down Columbus Avenue on the morning when she was wearing a new blouse for the first time. Or she gave in to whim, following a path defined by successive flights of pigeons, a path that might lead her east down Seventy-third Street to the park instead of across on Seventy-fifth or Sixty-eighth.

The pattern of her traverses from one day to the next gave her a sense of the vastness in which she lived; she was aware not only of the surface of each street but, simultaneously, of the tunneling below, which carried water mains and tree roots, like the meandering chambers of gophers(2). And ranging above, she knew without having to look, were tiers upon tiers of human life, the joy and anger and curiosity of creatures like herself.

She arrived by one or another of her footpaths—she imagined them, lying awake at night, like a rete mirabile, a tracery over the concrete, the tar, and the stone—at a room on the second floor of the Museum of Natural History, a vaulted, well-lit space in which she worked six or seven hours a day, preparing fossils of marine organisms from the Cambrian period and the Precambrian era. It was her gift to discern in the bits of rock placed before her lines of such subtlety that no one who beheld her excisions could quite believe what she had done. Under the bold, piercing glass of a microscope, working first with the right hand and then, when the muscles in that hand lost their strength, the left, she removed clay and sand and silt, grain by grain, her eyes focused on suggestions indescribably ambivalent. When she finished and set the pieces apart, one saw in stone a creature so complete, even to the airiness of its antennae, that it rivaled something living.

Passage A: Excerpt from "Introduction" from the book SOUNDINGS:

The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt. Copyright © 2012 by Hali Felt. Used by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Passage B: From the short story "The Open Lot" by Barry Lopez (©1994 by Barry Holstun Lopez) . Used with permission.