What Maps Leave Out

The first map I ever loved was wrong about almost everything.

It was a hand-drawn thing, made by my grandfather, showing the route from his village to the nearest town — a journey he’d made hundreds of times on foot and later by bicycle. The scale was improvised. Distances stretched where the road was difficult, compressed where it was easy. Landmarks were chosen by feeling: the tree that marked the halfway point, the field where something had happened that I was never told the full story of, the bend in the road where you first heard the town before you saw it.

By any cartographic standard, it was useless. By any other standard, it was precise.

The argument of the map

A map is always an argument. It decides what counts as real — what gets a name, what gets a line, what can be left blank without loss. These decisions are never neutral, even when they look like they are.

The Mercator projection, used for most of the twentieth century’s world maps, made Europe look larger than Africa. This was mathematically convenient for navigation. It was also, conveniently, politically flattering to the people making the maps. The distortion wasn’t a mistake. It was a choice, made by people who lived in certain places and thought those places were important, rendered as objective fact.

All maps do this. They just usually do it more subtly.

What a map makes invisible is as important as what it shows. The blank spaces aren’t empty. They’re just not considered.

The texture of place

My grandfather’s map was wrong about distances and right about everything that mattered to him. The tree was there because the tree was where you rested. The field was there because it held a memory. The bend in the road was there because that was where the journey changed character — where you shifted from traveler to arrival.

These aren’t the things official maps record. Official maps record what can be measured. But the experience of place is made of things that resist measurement: the quality of light at a particular hour, the way a street smells after rain, the acoustic difference between a neighborhood that is thriving and one that is in decline.

You feel these things before you can name them. They are, in a real sense, the most important information about a place. And they don’t appear on any map.

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There’s a tradition in certain indigenous cultures of navigating not by landmarks but by songs — walking routes encoded as melodies, the landscape remembered as music. Bruce Chatwin wrote about this in Australia, the songlines that mapped a continent into sound.

I’ve thought about this a lot. It’s a different epistemology of place — not asking where is this? but what is this like? Not representation but relationship.

My grandfather’s map was a little like that. It didn’t represent the route so much as remember it, the way a person remembers — incompletely, selectively, with emphasis on what mattered and elision of what didn’t.

The town has changed. The road has changed. Some of the landmarks are gone. But the map is still accurate, because it was never trying to describe the road. It was trying to describe the experience of traveling it — which is to say, it was trying to describe him.

That’s what maps leave out: the person who made the journey. And sometimes that’s the only thing worth knowing.