“Geography, my father liked to explain . . .”

Geography, my father liked to explain, is a Greek word that means writing the world.  A map will anchor you, ground you, guide you when you are lost.  A map will supply the name of the town you are passing through and the stream running alongside the road.  

My father knew the configuration of the earth not only as we understand it but as the ancients believed it to be.

He brought out primitive and astonishing maps, secreted in the volumes of his library.  They showed the shape of the world and how it, incredibly, changed, from the Greek concept of the inhabited world to the Christian cosmos depicted by medieval monks to the approximation of our own charted by the great explorers. . . .  

The explorers set sail for they knew not where, venturing beyond that watery frontier which looks like a precipice.  Sometimes they didn’t know where they had landed, my father said.  “Sometimes they got swallowed up, or shipwrecked, or eaten by savages.”  He laughed. . . .

If they were lucky they found land before their food and water ran out.

“What if they didn’t come back?” I asked.                                          

“Getting back was easier,” my father said.  “They knew the way.”

They could get lost, though, couldn’t they?   Even my father said so.  Shipwrecked or swallowed up.  Maybe they got lost there, maybe they ran away.  They could disappear, into forests where the sun never shines, on rivers going deeper and deeper into uncharted territory.  Even if they made it ashore, even if they didn’t get shipwrecked or blown off course. . . .

A person could disappear, slip into the unknown.  Never to be heard from again.