I need to locate a mapmaker. Does anyone know a mapmaker?
I’m all out of conversation this morning, having experienced this past weekend my most social few days since approximately 1998: We held a doozy of a memorial party at Ashawagh Hall on Sunday for my departed mother and I’ve been talking and talking and talking nonstop — with long-lost friends who came bearing potato salad, with good neighbors who let other guests have a seat and took the standing-room-only crowding with good cheer, with Larry and Harriet from Texas, with an all-star cast of onetime Star reporters who all somehow still look exactly like they did in 1992 — for a week solid. I find myself on deadline morning with nothing left to say. The spigot of words has run dry. Long Island’s chattiest columnist would like to put a damp washcloth over her eyes and lie down for a nap.
But I’ve had this idea for a few years now that requires some artistic assistance, and I think I’ll solve the dilemma of having no topic this week by using this column as a free help-wanted classified ad.
The idea is that I would like to turn my Shipwreck Roses, of which there are 225 so far, into a book that tells a story with a narrative that is linear in a geographic sense rather than a temporal or horological sense. Imagine a map of the East End — the Montauk Lighthouse to, say, the Shinnecock Canal — with a numbered legend for individual chapters which take place at particular local locations. Coordinates of longitude and latitude. The column I wrote about the ice boating at Mecox, or the one about how I thought the Hundred Acre Wood was at Napeague when I was small, or the few I’ve written about the South and North Ferries. Can you see what I mean? The book can be read in a line, running east to west, rather than following the line of time. The forward march of the plot is terrestrial and topographical, not a story unfolding experientially.
I need someone, an artist, to make for me a map of the South Fork that can be used in the “front matter” of the bound volume, an unfolding frontispiece of two or three pages.
Anyone, anyone?
The reason I haven’t accomplished this book already despite having said I was going to do it for ages and ages (indeed, the concept predates “The Shipwreck Rose” by 10 or 15 years) is because I kept pretending to myself that I was going to be my own cartographer, putting on a smock, getting out the calipers, and tracing the contours of the 1873 survey by Beers, Comstock, and Cline. But life is passing by with increasing speed, and I haven’t done it yet. I need to expedite. Most likely, this project will become the third full-length book manuscript to join the other two already yellowing in the drawers of my desk, but what the hey. Wasting time is the greatest prodigality, as Benjamin Franklin said; lost time cannot be found again.