Terrain—So Much More than a Map

What’s up with how our memory neurons encode the more subtle topographies of feeling?

Terrain as Topography

My older son entered kindergarten in a brand-new program that opened with only two classes. The Portland Family Cooperative School, part of Portland Public Schools and co-located with two other programs, would feature innovations like multi-grade classes and student-led learning goals, with large blocks of unstructured time for pursuing them. The kindergarten occupied the auditorium; the mixed 1^st–3^rd grade class had a small classroom.

Both classes had wagon-loads of large wooden building blocks—from I know not where—which the kids used in ongoing constructions that grew and morphed the whole year long like something alive. At some point, a teacher observed that in the auditorium (truly, too vast for those little tykes), the kids had developed a sprawling megalopolis that extended far and wide over the orange carpet. In the older kids’ tighter quarters, the wooden towers of a vertical city rose. And fell. And rose again in different form.

Without knowing it, they were enacting the way terrain calls the shots as ports and crossroads develop into cities. Los Angeles and Chicago spread into the flatlands; Singapore and Hong Kong rose into the sky.

The natural terrain we see and move through derives from what underlies it: geology, which was my favorite undergraduate subject in the environmental science “orgy of the ologies.” (Our core courses were geology, hydrology, ecology, and meterology; there was a t-shirt.)

The urban topography most people think about tends to be related to how we’ll get around, where we’ll go for what we want. Streets, waterways, transit routes. But not for writer-thinker-explorer Robert Macfarlane.

Last week I fell into another of his aura-expanding and sometimes claustrophobia-inducing chapters in Underland: A Deep Time Journey. That chapter, called “Invisible Cities (Paris),” (which you can read as a New Yorker essay) includes a chronicle of the days he spent beneath Paris, where underground camping is a thing. Just think about that a minute.

Terrains Underneath

Paris was built atop and with beautiful, creamy sandstone that was quarried from the 12^th to 19^th centuries. That ultra-locally-sourced Lutetian sandstone is what you see when you look at the Louvre, Notre Dame, and other Parisian beauties.

Notre Dame in 2022, under repair from the 2019 fire. Image © Kelly Lenox. All rights reserved.

“All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere,” writes Macfarlane, coining a mathematics of development. In the case of Paris, that subtraction happened underneath its lanes and stables and centers of learning.

The voids that were left behind form tunnels and chambers ”fanning out beneath the city like the roots of a great tree,” as Will Hunt described them, in an essay on LitHub. Portions of these quarries eventually saw use as the Paris Catacombs, beginning in 1786 after the town’s cemeteries began to overflow. Remains were excavated, transported, and reinterred in empty quarry tunnels that you can tour on your next trip to Paris.

Exhibit with mannequin, “Catacombes de Paris” by pioneering photographer Felix Nadar, 1861. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, PET FOL-EO-15 (19). Public domain.

These catacombs, in turn, lent their name to cataphiles—a subculture of folks who explore the quarried spaces—illegally—discovering inscriptions left centuries ago by stonecutters. They create theaters, memorials and art galleries because, where better to reproduce Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa? They have parties. They play cat-and-mouse with cataflics (flic being French slang for cop).

Mind blown. The chapter journeys on beyond Paris, as Macfarlane joins other urban explorers, like Bradley Garrett, in California:

“Bradley saw cities more vertically and porously than anyone else I knew. To his eyes, the city was full of portals—service hatches, padlocked doorways, manhole covers—that lay unseen in plain sight. … To [Garrett] the city’s accessible space extended far down into the earth (sewers, bunkers, tunnels) and far up into the air (skyscrapers, cranes), with the street-level only serving as a median and somewhat tedious altitude.”

“A median and somewhat tedious altitude.” What a way to characterize the place most of us are content to dwell in! Plus, metaphorical resonances, which brought up other recent musings…

Terrains of Time

Looking back on these pandemic years, it seems that what felt in the moment like daily crises have begun to blend into a sort of sameness. 2021, 2022—was there a difference? Receding into memory, they absolutely take on a median and somewhat tedious altitude.

Do your skyscraper (peak) and bunker (valley) experiences also mellow to a more gently rolling topography as the fingers of time get to work on them? (Shout out to the sacred work of massage therapists!) The way Himalayas will one day be kneaded down into Appalachians?

Not the tragedies, or the true joys—both resist flattening. Rather, the things that merely ruin your day. Or make it. What’s up with how our memory neurons encode the more subtle topographies of feeling?

These are not rhetorical questions. I’m curious about your thoughts or insights on this sensation (use the comments field below).

The Terrain of Subtraction

Finally, instead of a poem about stone, or kindergarten, or Paris or memory, here’s one about subtraction. Tangentially related, but I love it.

And you can read the whole piece without me violating copyright because Jay Leeming posted “The Barber” on his website (along with an audio version)! I’ll share just the beginning.

This goes out to all the people in three generations of my family who do (or did) hair.

The Barber     (by Jay Leeming)

The barber is someone who creates
by taking away, like a writer
who owns only an eraser.
He is like a construction company

that begins with a large office building
and ends up with a small wooden house…