Column: A story about the maps in our world

When I attended Lindbergh Elementary School on Costa Mesa’s eastside in the early 1950s, every classroom came equipped with a pull-down wall map.

Oh, what reveries those colorful maps generated within my spirit.

The “world map” was actually a collection of maps that hung over the chalkboard. The whole package weighed as much as the Volkswagen I drove a few years later in college.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember a teacher of mine ever going to the map to point out anything. Oops, I’m wrong. Mr. Gilbert once referenced Nicaragua in the sixth grade.

The map always intrigued me. It opened my mind to the world. It provided tantalizing glimpses into a 1950s “anything is possible” atmosphere.

At the time, I’d never been outside of California. But, I lived in a world of expanding horizons. Life beckoned. That colorful map diverted my attention from my instructors’ mundane incoherencies and took me on journeys through myriad time zones and from hemisphere to hemisphere.

I learned to read a map before I learned to dance the Hully Gully.

From my seat as a sixth grader, my imagination utilized that Lindbergh map to take me on mental journeys to oceanic islands, sweeping deserts, soaring mountain ranges, indigo forests, steaming jungles, remote cities and cultural enclaves. Those interludes provided a welcomed respite from the monotony of classroom pedagogics.

And, all was accomplished without an on/off power switch.

I drew maps at my desk of nonexistent continents and archipelagoes, and wrote adventure tales. I was a Texas League version of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Lindbergh’s world maps contained notable features.

For instance, the British Isles — located about an inch to the left of Amsterdam in the Netherlands on Europe’s western cusp — were colored pink on every map. Why?

Canada, Australia and India were pink, too, probably because they were or had been part of the British Empire.

When I first visited England in 1973, I half expected the landscape and structures to exude a pinkish hue — from Westminster Abby to the Cotswolds. Thankfully, that was not the case.

Here’s a note on Amsterdam, an inch east across the Channel from Richard’s “sceptered isle”: when I was a 10-year-old sixth grader my fetching bride-to-be (20 years hence) — Hedy — was a 4-year-old soon-to-be Amsterdam resident. Had I known that at the time, I might have given more attention to the lair of William of Orange.

Over the coming years, with my love by my side, I crossed on numerous occasions that “inch” of water separating the “Royal Throne of Kings” from a slew of Europe’s mortals.

By the way, I’d seen a film in fourth or fifth grade about the brave and industrious Dutch people taming the North Sea. By sixth grade, I’d heard the story of the resourceful Dutch boy who saved his country by plugging a hole in a dike with his finger.

As I entered junior high, I confidently thought I knew the sum total of Dutch history, psychology and culture. Well, val-deri, val-dera oh Happy Wanderer, best recheck your knapsack. After 43 years of marital bliss I can say I have only scratched the surface of the complexities and depths of my Dutch lady’s persona.

Here are a few observations regarding maps I viewed in elementary school: because of the distortion of flat-map projection, I must have been in grad school before I realized that Greenland isn’t as big as Africa, and Alaska isn’t as large as Mexico; the Atlantic Ocean was smack in the middle of the map, while the much larger Pacific was partitioned into two seas located on either edge of the map (to get from San Diego to Tokyo, one must hang a U at Maui and travel about 20,000 miles east); and Madagascar resembled a battleship plying the waters off East Africa.

Maps, I’ve learned, are nifty utensils. They teach us that we can’t be certain where we’re going if we don’t plot a course.

If you take nothing away from these few tedious lines, remember this: England — that “demi-paradise” — is pink … always pink.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.