It started like this. In April, Google began mapping Asheville, where I live. They finished this process recently, giving everyone a great street-level view of this city. Last night, over bourbon and wine, my friend Bear and I decided to have some fun with this, and a good time was had by all. "Oh, there's a tourist!" "There's where I work!" "There's my car!"
Asheville proper has just over 75,000 people in it, so it's small enough that one can still make those recognitions. Nonetheless, it is a city and its downtown has one of the largest accumulations of Art Deco architecture around, so it's not surprising that Google got around to mapping it.
But we wanted to find out where it ended. We couldn't. It seems Google had gotten most of the surrounding small mountain towns too.
So we tried our hometowns, as neither of us are from large places. It was there that I saw it.
Google has mapped South Mills.
South Mills, North Carolina is my hometown. It has less than 300 souls and is very, very far from the urban labyrinths that increasingly dominate the planet. On occasions where people ask where I'm from, it goes something like this, beginning with me:
"South Mills."
"Where?"
"Uh, it's near Elizabeth City."
"Where the fuck is that?"
I try to think of a tourist spot.
"It's not too far from the beach around Kill Devil Hills."
"There's people around there?"
"Yes, it's in fucking northeastern NC." Translation: "Yes, human beings actually live outside of large cities you ignorant scrap."
Now, there it all is. The red brick house beside Cartwright's gas station where I spent my younger years, the canal locks where my dad used to take me. The three churches scattered near the middle of town, including the United House of Prayer for All People, with its bizarre night-lit neon crosses. Hell, if you go down Mullen St. and turn left on 17, you can see the high-rise bridge that my child's mind took as a symbol of grand possibility.
So the past is real. This is not always a comfortable insight. Memory has a way of softening things, allowing us to put our own art on where we've been. It helps us to meld it into our own ever-changing identity. So when Google has it all there, crystal clean on the screen, it both is and isn't my hometown. I can recognize the shapes and forms, but my childhood visions will always have a different cast.
Google can't yet bring us the smell of oil around the repair shop in Cartwright's back -- or the conversations the old men have on torn-out bus seats in the front. It can remind me that the woods where, as a boy, I ran an afternoon kingdom are gone forever. But it's my brain that realizes that: to the computer it's just another image on the screen.
I'm glad Google Streets exists, I'm glad it's made the world a sliver more real, that much larger (or smaller). I'm happy that I can share the roads of my past with others. But those all belong to a different self, from years ago, stirred up for a second by old recognition. Thomas Wolfe was right: you can't go home again.
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