A Drive Around "Campus"

Thoughts on the (limited but real) power of stories

I’ve been thinking recently for some reasons about a number of things that increasingly are interrelated in my mind.

One is the friction of distance, and how much of what makes college years a special time is the minimal distance between things.

Another is that it’s very easy to tell a narrative or story about a thing we’re looking at, and then without even realizing it impose that story on the actual thing we’re looking at, interpret it through our own made-up frame, and then think that we are seeing confirmation of our story when in reality we’re not even looking at what’s in front of us.

And the third one, kind of an instance of the second, is that to some extent, the “spread-out-ness” of suburbia that I’m always on about is a story. Yes, the raw distances between homes, jobs, and points of interest are real. But by imagining that we live in a chopped up, separated environment where nothing coheres or fits together, on some level we make that perception true. We act as if it’s true. At some subtle point it can stop becoming an explanation or description and start becoming a limiting perception.

Thinking about college, my “story” of college was pretty aligned with what it was (at least in terms of the physical place; not unfortunately in terms of some other things). My mental map of the campus was, basically, the actual map of the campus. Looking back, it took probably only a couple of months for 90 or 95 of the campus and the surrounding town to become “connected” in my mind; not just a disparate series of destinations, but an overall place.

I used to think of it kind of like the overworld in a video game. “Campus” was its own place, with the individual buildings and functions slotting into that sense of place-ness and order. Being “on campus” meant you could, with minimal effort, be at any of those sub-destinations in a matter of minutes. It meant that in real life, but it also meant that in our understanding of the place. None of them were really distinct in the sense that you ever thought “Oh that’s too far away, some other time.”

What has really struck me recently is that my tendency to see suburbia as hopelessly sprawling, stretched apart, and centerless—to tell that story about it, and see the actual, real-world space I traverse filtered through that story—probably intensifies that perception and causes me to miss some of what’s really there.

As a kind of thought experiment, I tried to imagine the square (roughly speaking) of space where we do the majority of errands, work, dining out, etc. (An obvious missing piece is socializing, because you rarely end up near your close friends from earlier periods in your life.) I have no idea what that land area is precisely, but a rough look at Google Maps with the measuring tool suggests somewhere in the ballpark of 100 square miles.

Now the majority of that square of space is residential-only areas which have no real reason to exist on the mental map unless you know someone who lives there. So seeing it in terms of square miles overstates the distances/spaces involved. In reality, the “overworld” of my normal activities is really the highway corridors and towns where I tend to go.

And the point is that, really—in terms of driving time, because this exercise is hopeless without assuming a car for nearly everything—the times and distances are not that great. They’re not that much more, and often the same or less, than the longest possible walk on my college or grad school campuses.

So why not do the work of forming more of a cohesive mental map of the area I live in, and imagine my day a bit like traversing this “campus,” trying to see what feel like completely random, unrelated tasks taking you here there and everywhere as little strolls within the bounds of a single “place”? Could that mental re-perception leaven or enlighten the daily grind?

For example, there’s an