Terrain is a texture we feel with the whole body, a grain to be shared by entire communities and even nations. Like the weave of the blankets we lie under and the shapes they loosely take as we toss and turn and dream, the shape of the earth's surface wraps our life experiences even when we least consider it.
I'm fascinated by materials and the endless variety of qualities they can have. Considering that almost everything is made of some sort of material interacting with other materials and various forms of energy, it's as easy to remain fascinated as it is to overlook the ubiquitous. Terrain is the same way; you're always experiencing it in some way, even if you're not thinking about it at all. The shape and qualities of a place in the world can affect our individual and collective experiences, facilitate memories, and have a strange way of connecting us to one another, in turn influencing the ways architecture manifests in one place as compared to another. The built environment is derivative of the intersection between the natural environment and our experience of it.
In cartography terrain can be discussed in any number of ways. Maps can focus on specific features or entire formations, illustrate types of regions through designated patterns, or express the configuration of a city streets compared to natural boundaries. Personally, I have a soft spot for contour lines, because they lift the texture of the land off of the page like nothing else. Whether left as raw, concentric lines, extrapolated into three-dimensional shaded imagery, or something in between, contours can help us simulate entire swaths of earth. When we consider terrain in this way, we set the ever-present texture of the earth at a different scale, a finer weave, and gain a new way of thinking about this thing that we may scarcely think about only because it is always there.
Allow me to use contour lines to take you into a memory, as a way of illustrating that connection between terrain and experience.
A Mountain Memory
When I was growing up, my parents took me and my sister and brother to Colorado for a week in the summertime. Almost everything I remember is connected to the landscape. Winding along meandering roadways with a wall of rock on the right and a shear drop on the left. A mighty bridge spanning a gorge too deep to comprehend. We'd had trips to mountainous areas before, but the spectacular contrast between the extreme heights of the Rocky Mountains and the relentlessly low elevation we were used to as Floridians overtook us as we disappeared into the valleys.
The highlight of the trip was the day we took an inclined railway to the summit of Pike's Peak, the highest mountain in its region of the Rocky Mountains. The train took what I remember as close to an hour, rumbling continually upward in a meandering path, to take us up from the nearest town. The vegetation gradually grew increasingly sparse, giving way to fragments of the pink granite the range is made of. Our views from the windows were sometimes long but mostly shortened, limiting how much of the range we could see until we met the mountain's full height at elevation over 14,000 ft / 4200 m.
When we got off the train, it was so mindblowingly cold and windy -- it had definitely been summer when we boarded, but it was always winter here. It was the coldest I had ever been, and even now that I've spent a few winters in the Midwest that were probably colder than that, I still remember it as the coldest I've ever felt.
The mountaintop was a relatively small area, ringed by a metal railing. Everything had a twilight feeling to it, not very dark but not bright either, like the sun didn't want to presume too much. There was a single building, a small gift shop that we soon realized was the the only refuge from the unrelenting cold which was getting more intense by the minute. But looking out over the rails, the surrounding view was so transcendently wonderful that we didn't mind braving the cold as long as we could.
In every direction as far as we could see were gray and purple mountains receding into the horizon, all of them shorter than the one we stood on. The evening light cascaded over them as the earth rose and fell in deep, sleepy valleys and high, strong peaks. It was the most beautiful place I'd ever been, and the unfamiliar terrain had made the world so much bigger and taller than it had ever been for me.
I turned and saw a tall metal sign embossed with the lyrics of the song "America the Beautiful." I knew that song, but on the mountaintop I learned that it was originally a poem entitled "Pikes Peak" by Katherine Lee Bates, inspired by this very place. I was looking as the very same "purple mountain majesties" the poet wrote about.
There were little patches of ice and snow on the ground, which would have been incredible enough to me as a Floridian even if it weren't July. I remember scraping up a little handful of it and throwing a tiny snowball over the edge. It's hard to say how long we stayed up there, but it was simply too cold to stay for more than maybe half an hour. We retreated eventually into the gift shop and impulsively purchased two blankets out of urgent necessity, before boarding the train again and, trembling, descending back down to the earth we knew.
The map below shows Pikes Peak and its immediate surroundings using a gradient to express the terrain with what comes out as an organic, tie-dye-like pattern. Click to enlarge and see the contours in greater detail.
Looking closely you can see white line crawling through the landscape, indicating the few roads that climb this high. The one extending from the bottom right to the very top of the mountain is the inclined railway we took. A very fine, straight line stretches across the left side of the map to indicate the nearby border between Colorado and Utah. To focus on the sheer form of the landscape I've forgone labels and elevation numbers, and made the north arrow and scale as subtle as possible, as this particular map of the area is less informational than experiential. As the color drains away with the increasing elevation, the warmth and the plant and animal life dissipate as well. This place is home to nearly nothing, a location just outside the reaches of the world, where visitors come to view the Creation with awe.
A Picture of a Place
I don't have any photos of this moment. I remember trying to make a self portrait of the experience for an art class, but I didn't do it any justice. What I saw was simply too expansive for me to have remembered it photographically; it looks dreamy and otherworldly in my memory. This map is a better picture of it, of the place and my memory of it, than any other could be. It was a fully immersive moment, filling up the senses, pushing away thoughts of other places with the sense of being somewhere both in the world and outside of it, making the world seem somehow both bigger and smaller. Seeing the surface of the terrain that facilitated that experience expressed as a dreamy gradient, letters and numbers and symbols falling away in favor of shear contrast and forms rising and falling, feels like a good way to illustrate what it was like to be captivated by that landscape.
And terrain is everywhere on earth. While Pikes Peak is a special place that rises above marvelous surroundings, truly terrain touches our lives wherever we live them, mountains or not. One of the best funnest things about cartography is spotlighting a place and translating its attributes into compositional elements to create a portrait of somewhere that means something to somebody. The places we call home, and the places we visited briefly once upon a time.
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