Folds in the Map: Stories of Life's Unlikely Intersections

By Jeff Bauer

Folds in the Map is a collection of essays and stories by emerging author Jeff Bauer. In these pages, he embarks on an earnest, touching journey to discover the places where we feel most connected as human beings – to each other, to nature, and to the world around us. From the bottom of a bomb crater in Laos, to a refugee camp on the Sudanese border, to the side of a Panamanian volcano, and back home again to the frozen January streets of Minnesota, Folds in the Map is a moving, intensely personal exploration of shared experience and unlikely intersection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9780615892085

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Bauer

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Inciteful Press / Jeff Bauer

577 Gorman Avenue

St. Paul, MN 55107

www.incitefulpress.com

Bauer, Jeff

Folds in the Map – stories of life’s unlikely intersections / Jeff Bauer. – 1st ed.

ISBN 978-0-615-89125-5 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-615-89208-5 (ebook)

Cover design by Micah Vono

Cover photography by Jeff Bauer

Author photo by Melissa Tran

Printed in the United States of America

Contents:

Introduction

Part I: Awake and Far From Home

Stalked by Sir Isaac

Secret Wars

Beauty and Bread

Part II: In the Company of Strangers

A Path through the Darkness

Living in the Middle

My Brief and Unsuccessful Career in Telemarketing

Something About Squirrels and iPods

The Waiting Room

Part III: The Animals and Us

In Defense of the Bumblebee

Tracks in the Snow

A Converging Sequence

Flying Blind

Part IV: Underneath It All

Wonder

Staying on the Board

From Ruin

Life, In the Arc of a Stone’s Throw

For Tony

Folds in the Map

stories of life’s unlikely intersections

"We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity."

- Paulo Coelho

Introduction

I wrote the first essay for this book, Beauty and Bread, on the heels of a humanitarian project in the refugee camps on the border of Chad and Sudan in late 2006. At the time, I was simply trying to deal with the intensity of the experience and to get my head and my heart back together again. I certainly didn’t have any notion that I had just written what would become, seven years later, the seminal chapter of my first book. What I did know, however, was that the process of writing Beauty and Bread had opened something in me that I didn’t want to close again, and I began writing an apparently random and unrelated collection of essays and short stories, each spurred by some formative event in my life, beginning in early 2007. At first these stories didn’t seem to follow any pattern or to fit into any particular category. One might be sparked by a conversation with a stranger on a park bench while another might be unearthed during a hike among the animals in the winter woods. It wasn’t until much later that I started to recognize the common thread running through them all, the singular theme that tied them together. I slowly realized that nearly every story I wrote had its origin in a place where my life had intersected with another’s in some strange and beautiful way, whether a human life or an animal one, whether a stranger or a friend, whether in my own backyard or in some far-flung corner of the world. These places where we meet, these folds in the map, I have now come to believe, reveal some of life’s most powerful and compelling lessons if we are open and willing to learn them.

So, here are my humble stories about those places and the things I’ve learned. Here is your invitation to join me on this journey. Here is our chance to walk the folds of our maps, if you’re willing to come along, to find the places where our lives overlap.

Part I:

Awake and Far From Home

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

- Terry Pratchett

Stalked by Sir Isaac

36 hours ago the cell phone alarm was ringing, but I was already awake, watching the numbers change minute by minute... 3:27... 3:28... 3:29... 3:30... my mind already moving, my body protesting in any number of ways, like the throbbing pressure at the base of my skull, shooting over my cranium and landing just behind my twitching right eye. Everything manifests in its own way, and all things come to rest somewhere. My half-grinded teeth and habitually clenching jaw tell more true stories than my mouth ever has, and the alarming expansion of my belly belies the many things I carry that I should have abandoned long ago. I’m hauling them all with me out into the world to try to shake them loose, to try to shed their weight somewhere along the way.

24 hours ago I landed in Panama City, anxiously exiting another metal tube full of stale, recycled air and all manner of noxious human excretions. I used to think it was the smell of a new country that hits you first – every place I’ve ever been has its own smell, from the scorched red dirt of Africa, to the smoke and jasmine of Vietnam, to the pine-infused air of my northern Minnesota home. It isn’t the smell, though, it’s the feel of the air – the density of it, the humidity, the way it touches your skin and clings to your clothes. It hits you the second you exit the airplane into the jet bridge. It carries with it the first notion that you are not home, that you have breached the castle walls and have entered the forest – that you are nowhere you have been before.

The smells hit you next, then the sounds, diesel and dialect, street food and spices, perfume, car horns, body odor, the sweat of the vegetation and the sun off the soil. Every place feels, smells, and sounds different even if the distinctions are subtle.

Always the unnerving press upon arrival, faces too close, hands grabbing to carry this or that, scuffling and scrapping for a few American dollars, maybe the only chance of the day to give a ride or to tote somebody’s $400 North Face backpack for a couple of bucks. It’s a complicated dance, too, when pride, negotiation, privilege, and principle collide in the singular question of whether or not it’s rude to barter down from $3 to $2 and then ask if they can make change for the smallest bill in your possession which, at this moment, is a 50. I’ve played this game hundreds of times in dozens of countries and it never gets any less uncomfortable. Whichever way it comes out it always feels pretty gross – a seemingly unwinnable and intrinsically exploitative transaction on both ends.

Mulling this question, I’m in another cab in another country, watching the places where street vendors and slums used to be flash by like flipping the pages of a magazine – all ads and no stories – Gucci, Dolce, and Prada intermingled with Movistar, Digicel and the Panamanian version of Target which, for some reason, is called Conway and is represented by the same ubiquitous red bullseye except that it has one additional ring. The slums still exist, now in the shadows of lingerie and makeup billboards, cars they will never buy and lives they will never live. It somehow makes the passing scene feel vulgar, turning an ironic contrast from art to pornography. I wonder if they look up at those billboards and feel like that desperately lonely guy at the strip club, laying down his meager wages one dollar bill at a time, paying for the illusion that he can ever possess the woman on the stage, but swiftly and harshly corrected for his behavior if he tries to reach out and touch her for real.

I remember hearing about a story in Chicago, where they wrestled with the discomfort of people driving on the freeways at seeing the poverty and squalor of the housing projects. Lacking the political will and resources to build more attractive and humane housing, they decided to handle the problem in a different way. They built walls along the freeway, high enough to shield the projects from the view of the drivers hurtling down six and eight-lane freeways that were once the veins and arteries cycling lifeblood through the hearts of the mostly black communities they dissected. Once the walls were done, they decided to put one finishing touch on them. They paid someone to paint fake cityscapes – ones more pleasing to the eye and less grating on the conscience than the reality they were erected to conceal.

It’s amazing the lengths we will go to avoid discomfort and instability. Truly amazing.

So it’s quite likely I’m out here again trying to pry the greedy, groping fingers of my own illusions, one by one, off of my skull and from the bony edges of my eye sockets, trying to produce enough force and velocity to peel my skin back and reveal my warm, quivering guts so I can see what’s really in there.

12 hours ago I was in a scabies-infested hostel full of Euro hipster kids, cooking pancakes and trying not to get some weird rash from the bed sheets. I hadn’t been as acutely aware of how old I’ve gotten

Reviews for Folds in the Map

[ionas_7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I received this book free in return for a review.This is not the sort of book I usually review, in fact I haven’t ever encountered a modern collection of essays before. At the start I wasn’t really sure that I would appreciate the book, but it soon began to captivate me.The essays range from an account of climbing up a volcano together with the spirit of Sir Isaac Newton to teaching “rules of art” to children in a refugee camp in Eastern Chad, to one containing the author’s pet hates, mostly the Kardashians –and I understand him though I have no clue who the Kardashians are, only seen the name of the TV-programme on them innumerable times – my intuition has warned me to steer well away from this programme, and not even take a peek at it.As regards the volcano trip with Sir Isaac, the author and his wife, I have this question for the author – why so many accusative-infinitive constructions in the Latin version of Sir Isaac’s comments (I’m afraid my Latin isn’t quite up to par)?It turned out that the Sir Isaac essay was about relationships, how to ensure that they keep working well. Relationships change, and you have to work to keep them in balance. “You have to build it and rebuild it every single day. Sometimes tear part of it down and try something different.”I like the essay about the Rules of Art. The author and an interpreter are in a refugee camp in Eastern Chad and the author is conducting an art class. The interpreter insists on the children being given rules, so Jeff comes up with the following rules – Rule 1: There are no mistakes in art. Rule 2: Use your imagination. Art is a way to tell your stories without words. Rule 3: Your mind is powerful, Use it to create the world you want to see.These are touching accounts of the contact between Jeff and the refugee children.Another striking essay is the one about the plagued street person who forces his way into Jeff’s car, and their ensuing encounter.But the essay that particularly warmed my heart to Jeff was the one about his short career in telemarketing.I hate telemarketers, and think they should be banned by law. Jeff is instructed by his boss not to let anyone off the phone until they’ve said “no” at least three times. Jeff is initially a successful telemarketer, the best, but then his heart opens to the lonely senior citizens he talks to. All they want is someone to talk to. Jeff with his open heart stops trying to sell anything at all. He asks people about their lives and their families. He listens to their stories and answers their questions about his life and plans for the future.Jeff knows what to prioritize. He has a warm heart, and this is why I so appreciated this book.Thus, I greatly recommend this well-written book, which ranges over many fields of information; but the connecting thread in the book is communication from person to person, from heart to heart.