In my book entitled MAP: EXPLORING THE WORLD,
there's a page from Buzz Aldrin's Apollo 11 notebook,
(the three-hole-punch kind, from a binder
like the ones you'd get every August to gear up for school.)
The map is hand-drawn,
yellowed with time.
Navigating from this page,
he steered through the glow of streetlight stars,
the same stars sailors studied
from the surface of our oceans
one thousand years before.
Buzz says he used three stars on the chart,
plugged their coordinates into a keypad.
(I'm picturing a credit card terminal here,
but it could have been more like the new-fangled touchtone telephone,
introduced a few years before this flight.)
The stars he used are anagrams of the names of three astronauts
who died in the Apollo I training fire,
grim reminders that even carefully scripted notes
can end up in a failing grade.
Now, we are traveling on the Pennsylvania turnpike,
guided by an Australian-accented man we've named Ian.
If it were up to me,
I'd rather have that old accordion of paper
that used to live in the glove compartment,
the one with my father's yellow highlights
tracking our progress.
When Ian directs us to get off the pike before our expected exit,
we are startled, upset, even.
Is there an accident up ahead?
Could Ian's vision from space be protecting us from a long wait?
Maybe we plugged the wrong coordinates into our keypad?
Or is Ian wrong?
Can Ian be wrong?
Is Ian as reliable as Aldrin's looseleaf star guide?
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Author Notes
I love maps of all kinds, and there's this fabulous book entitled Map: Exploring the World, which features 300 different maps from all eras of cartography. Get it out of the library if you're interested, but I had to own it once I borrowed it. Incredible. I've used the actual map this poem refers to for the accompanying artwork. Fun to think about.
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