drabble-type thing
I drabbled this a week or so ago, when why_me_why_not needed some schmoop for cheering up. I meant to post it then but got side-tracked, and I was reminded of it when I checked Danger Room this morning.
So, here, from the Chart Your Way universe.
Nate loves maps, old ones, new ones, modern atlases and Blue Force Tracker projections, niece-drawn treasure maps and digitally enhanced projections.
He likes what old maps reveal about a people, historically, when he sees what they knew or thought they knew about the edges of their world. Geography and humanity have an inevitable effect upon each other.
He kept a reproduction of a map of Alexander's marches and battles through Persia in his dorm room for most of his senior year at Dartmouth. When he learned Bravo Two would be going to Iraq rather than Afghanistan, he dragged it out and pinned it to the wall above his desk, next to a modern map of the Middle East.
He has another map of the Middle East hanging in his office now, easily twice as large as the one he had back in 2003, hanging next to the old map of Alexander’s marches, which now has a swathe through the Hindu Kush highlighted. The newer map is dotted with pushpins, the kind with little colored plastic globes on the end. Green and black pins scattered from Qatar to Kuwait to Iraq to Afghanistan, on land and in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, guarding the Straits of Hormuz. If asked, Nate will explain what he knows (through friends of friends who are deployed, through colleagues at the Pentagon, scuttlebutt picked up at happy hour Friday night or over coffee at conferences and meetings) about NATO troop movements and Marine and Army outposts, naval battle groups.
An observant person might notice that for one solid year a blue pushpin hides in the sea of green and black that remains in the far southwest of Afghanistan.
It disappears for a few months. In that time the lines around Nate's eyes deepen from smiles rather than stress.
When it reappears, the blue pushpin lands squarely in Doha, but doesn't remain there. The blue dot moves from Baghdad to Karbala to Najaf, back to Baghdad, and then to Kirkuk and Mosul, where it stays for days, weeks, and the frown in Nate's eyes is matched by the downward curve of his lips.
Eventually a cluster of green pushpins joins, then replaces the blue one, and after that Nate's office door is closed, the light extinguished, while he's gone, out of town, on vacation for the first time since the last disappearance of the blue pushpin.
This entry was originally posted at http://favoritemistake.dreamwidth.org/7249.html.
So, here, from the Chart Your Way universe.
Nate loves maps, old ones, new ones, modern atlases and Blue Force Tracker projections, niece-drawn treasure maps and digitally enhanced projections.
He likes what old maps reveal about a people, historically, when he sees what they knew or thought they knew about the edges of their world. Geography and humanity have an inevitable effect upon each other.
He kept a reproduction of a map of Alexander's marches and battles through Persia in his dorm room for most of his senior year at Dartmouth. When he learned Bravo Two would be going to Iraq rather than Afghanistan, he dragged it out and pinned it to the wall above his desk, next to a modern map of the Middle East.
He has another map of the Middle East hanging in his office now, easily twice as large as the one he had back in 2003, hanging next to the old map of Alexander’s marches, which now has a swathe through the Hindu Kush highlighted. The newer map is dotted with pushpins, the kind with little colored plastic globes on the end. Green and black pins scattered from Qatar to Kuwait to Iraq to Afghanistan, on land and in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, guarding the Straits of Hormuz. If asked, Nate will explain what he knows (through friends of friends who are deployed, through colleagues at the Pentagon, scuttlebutt picked up at happy hour Friday night or over coffee at conferences and meetings) about NATO troop movements and Marine and Army outposts, naval battle groups.
An observant person might notice that for one solid year a blue pushpin hides in the sea of green and black that remains in the far southwest of Afghanistan.
It disappears for a few months. In that time the lines around Nate's eyes deepen from smiles rather than stress.
When it reappears, the blue pushpin lands squarely in Doha, but doesn't remain there. The blue dot moves from Baghdad to Karbala to Najaf, back to Baghdad, and then to Kirkuk and Mosul, where it stays for days, weeks, and the frown in Nate's eyes is matched by the downward curve of his lips.
Eventually a cluster of green pushpins joins, then replaces the blue one, and after that Nate's office door is closed, the light extinguished, while he's gone, out of town, on vacation for the first time since the last disappearance of the blue pushpin.
This entry was originally posted at http://favoritemistake.dreamwidth.org/7249.html.