On The Map

I pretend I know the map when all I know is how to use it: how to pull a plat that shows the contours of a small section of this place—of Sitka, Alaska—and how to jump from the city’s GIS (Global Information System) interactive map to the State of Alaska Recorder’s Office to the Bureau of Land Management survey search. With the map, I zoom around town. I pull PDFs of subdivisions and deeds and the knowledge is as real as the survey markers in the sidewalk, which is to say arbitrary. The map fills in gaps and points to the boundaries but can’t tell me all the stories. I ask it for stories, anyway.

Maps provide substantial context, but when I ask the GIS a question outside its purview—a question beyond those that can be answered with addresses and property owners—it stares blankly back, handing me the same information again: deed, plat, subdivision. The information spans a database, not a memory, and I have questions and a new job at the city’s planning office. Beyond the data, I crave the stories, and my job is to know the stories as well as the rules so that I may help the people, because now, I work for the people.

After I begin the job, I move to the old, complicated part of town, where people have lived for millennia. I move to a house with four apartments, three of which remember the 19th century, and when I learn the map, I learn I have questions about the house, about the jagged shape of the parcels abutting it. I pull every adjacent document that might tell me the story of this one shard of land and its division, and stare at generations of what used to be, at a U.S. survey from 1929, at a fire insurance map from 1914, at an architectural report from 2017. The land was once cut differently. Before that, the land was not cut, at all.

I do not know of a nonviolent way to cut the land like this, divvied up like dessert and at work, I learn about property rights. I learn about the authority individuals have over land, and it is the law, rigid, efficient. At work, I discuss demolition and new construction as if the land is passive and at night, I look at the old maps the GIS hands me and rage at how much of the land has been stolen.

At work, my coworker and I discuss construction some more and she doesn’t talk about building structures, but dropping them. She talks about an oil company “dropping a dock” and I picture it, the pilings and fuel tanks descending from the sky as if placed by God, and in my imagining I am standing below the fuel dock, watching it fall lazily as snow. I don’t adopt the turn of phrase but interrogate it; question how when my coworker uses the phrase, she is always alluding to the landowner and never the people employed to construct it.

The map sometimes feels like God, too: so definitive, its property lines a bold yellow or red, depending on the function a user employs. Look how someone molded this place to fit their desires, the map says, and I click and click and click, searching for a knowledge that barely penetrates the surface.

The house in which I live used to belong to a family that evaporated or left town, and when a son died in 1941, the house shifted ownership. The new folks merged lots and resubdivided. They requested a special election and purchased part of the town’s main street and built an eight-story apartment building. The old house remained, secreted behind the second-tallest building downtown.

The house was built adjacent to a burial ground, and when I learn of the history of the apartment building, of how it was built tall and without regard to the house, it fits the theme, the impulse to build without regard. It is easier and cruel to build without regard. At work, people call and ask if there are ways to stop or stall the demolition of an old and significant house, and when I return home, I pause at my door. I stare up at the sky, at the lit stairwells of the apartment building and remember my neighbor telling me of a time their father visited and moved slowly, barefoot, around our shared yard, and asked if people were buried there, and without speaking, everyone knew the answer was yes.