A Road in Montana

I cannot speak to the sensibilities of a cartographer.

I wonder, what sort of map might a cartographer prefer?

Consider the Midwest.  It’s a grid of roads out there.  The land, from flat to gently rolling, is often parsed into perfect squares, rectangles, triangles.  Country roads cover the entirety in perfect grids: section and quarter-section.  At regular intervals, where section roads meet, small towns appear like pools of colorful rainwater.  Giant cities sprawl with veins here and there.

Is that a cartographer’s dream?

Consider the difference here in Montana.  This is where you find my kind of road.  Narrow but perfectly defined, my road is drawn singularly across a vast expanse.  Out there somewhere in the expanse, maybe where a sweet-water creek intersects the road or a sudden elevation change has occurred, a small town is tied to the road like an incidental knot.  On a map, if you continue to trace this road, you soon find your finger squiggling about where the road has been flung up and over mountains and through valleys.  Then, abruptly, the road ends with no other road within many dozens of miles. 

Perhaps you are at the edge of a river.  Maybe a mountaintop.  Just that one little town far behind you.

Last night, in my non-cartographer’s dream, I reached a river.

--Mitchell Hegman