The Orient

I.

Even if you have lived in Howard county for five years, you had better take an atlas out driving. You know, just in case. I say this because I happen to have lived in Howard county for about that long, and tucked between the driver's seat and the center console of my mother's car, there is always an assortment of complimentary AAA Mid-Atlantic road atlases and handwritten directions to the airport. My mother likes to tell people that we just moved to Maryland, and that it's a big adjustment, that fall is pretty here but gosh it's just so different. Different, but we're all getting used to it, she is quick to add. What she means by that is that it’s been five years and she still needs a goddamned map to get anywhere, and no, she doesn't want one of those “GPS” things in her car. She shouldn't need one, or it's just one more thing you're asking her to change, or why does everyone out here think they need to spend so much money all the time-- did you know those things cost something like one hundred dollars and people just assume she's going to run out and buy one like it's a loaf of bread? That's what she means when she says things are different here. Maybe you had better just take the atlas

I guess it probably seems like some version of pathetic, which isn't so terribly inaccurate, but it's got nothing to do with a hereditary dysfunction in whatever part of the brain is responsible for developing mental maps, or spatial memory or whatever that's called. Although, thinking about it, I should probably just speak for myself. My mother was never really known for her stellar sense of direction. And I would really like to be fair. I've really tried to be fair. What I'm really saying is I understand that we're all human. But, the most human of us all is James Wilson Rouse.

Jim Rouse feared God and built shopping malls. He was good at it, too. The historians say he never missed church on Sunday, and the suburbs of the Mid-Century Mid-Atlantic say, well, they say that Delaware Township, New Jersey changed its name to Cherry Hill in 1961-- the name of the brand-new shopping mall Jim built there. One thing about a shopping mall is that even when it still sparkles, and is covered in polished, gleaming terrazzo tile (all the better for echoing fountains and clicking high-heels), every shopping mall has got to say: "YOU ARE HERE". The shopping mall is, if nothing else, self-aware. It understands itself, the physical space it inhabits. There are no landmarks; there is no way to intuit its layout. Jim Rouse, urban visionary, bought 14,000 acres of Howard County farmland and built a city like a shopping mall. That was the idea, anyway. Forty years later, I scratched and I bit and I clawed, but a whole chorus of voices told me over and over again: "YOU ARE HERE".

II.

Once, Robert Johnson met the devil at a crossroads; sometimes I half expect to meet him on an exit ramp. Now, I don't want you to think I'm saying that because I'm still sore about moving to Maryland or something. I'm not. Saying it because of that, I mean. It's just, sometimes I get trapped here, like this year, and most days there is only the Little Room, a magic box of my own creation, and the quick-merging four-lane expressways, surrounded by the U-turning 3-lane highways, surrounded by the speed-bumping subdivision streets to exist within.

Howard County is not strictly for the banished, though. It summons. Over mountains and bean fields white envelopes will arrive, and they will slide quietly under your door, and they will sit on a table in your front hall, and they will lurk on your bookshelf until they tell you that your car, the way you got the hell out of dodge, is due for mandatory emissions testing at the Columbia VEIP. Welcome home, sister. We missed you, Kylie. How long are you staying, Kylie?

I had accompanied my sister to the VEIP before, when my parents first gave her the car, during her junior year of college. I guess she thought we’d pretty much remember how to get there. I should have known that nobody "pretty much" remembers how to get anywhere here. I can "pretty much" get you to the very center of town, but from there you'd be lucky if you didn't accidentally end up getting on beltway, hurtling towards D.C., or wind up driving laps around Great Drum Circle and Gay Topaz Court, or somehow making your way though the endless parking lot for Columbia Crossing Shopping Center, or worse: Columbia Crossing Shopping Center II. Did you want Snowden River Parkway or 175 North? Did you mean to exit at Columbia Town Center? Or wait, no, Dobben Centre? No, Center. Centre? Wait, Town Center is just what they call the mall. That isn't right. Pull over there. You can't pull over there. Make a U-turn and pull over there. Park the car. Flagellate. Good. Now, get out the atlas.