Maps and Legends

(This was going to be a short piece about how it’s the thirty-ninth anniversary of R.E.M.’s album Fables of the Reconstruction and how important the song “Maps and Legends” is to me. R.E.M. is still in here, but in writing about the song, I’ve ended up down a rabbit hole into my anxiety-riddled adolescence, back to the bedroom that I’m just now realizing was literally covered in a striped yellow wallpaper that could very well have been in the story of that name. I do eventually get back to the song–but I’m leaving the memories that the song brings up here, as they demonstrate why the song continues to have such meaning for me.)

This year marks the thirty-ninth anniversary of R.E.M.’s album Fables of the Reconstruction, the band’s third studio album. My friend Jen marked the occasion recently on her Tuesday afternoon “Radio Nowhere” radio show on the Minnesota State University Mankato’s KMSU station. Having spent that morning sitting still in an online conference, I was glad to have Jen’s good taste in music along for a well-needed afternoon walk. 

It was especially wonderful to hear Jen play a song specifically for me, knowing how much I love the album generally and this song specifically. The song is “Maps and Legends,” and it’s a song that got me through some especially rough times.

When I was in high school, my parent’s marriage was deteriorating. My dad was not doing well at work, either, and he compensated for the trouble he was having at work and at home by throwing himself full-tilt into teaching Sunday school. He had an entire shelf of Bible concordances and guidebooks he used to prepare for the one hour each week when he was the star. One Sunday morning in 1989, he announced to the class that the Lord had appeared to him in a dream and told him to sell his possessions, move to Indiana, and go to seminary to become a minister.

Next to me, my mother bristled. “This is the sort of thing that one really should discuss with one’s wife before announcing it to the church,” she muttered. I kept my eyes on my hands, folded over the red leather New American Standard Bible in my lap. The lesson that Sunday was something from Romans–my mother now refers to that time as “the summer that your father thought he was Paul.”

She later told me that he did, in fact, apply to seminaries, and she just started throwing his mail away without telling him. Church became a frequent focus of  their arguments: he wanted to spend time at evangelical retreats, while she refused to have anything to do with such holy rollers. I imagine that it felt safer to argue about whether they needed to have full immersion baptism than to admit to the fear and uncertainty that they felt about my dad being pushed out of his division chief position at Georgia Tech.

Eventually, they came to a sort of compromise. Dad found a job in Ohio, and we would move there as soon as the house in Georgia sold. Both of my parents grew up in Ohio and met there while they were in college. Ohio to them represented family, happiness, and simpler times. 

My junior year of high school, Dad started his job in Dayton, Ohio, and stayed with his aunt and uncle in Middletown, the steel town where he had grown up. That year was rough. My mother, brother, and I adjusted somewhat to life just the three of us, keeping the house in that awful, impersonal state of decoration and housekeeping on which real estate agents insist (and that I hate). Dad drove from Ohio to Georgia every other weekend, where we’d stay in a state of upheaval as he tried to reassert his authority as head of the household, from insisting on meat-and-potatoes dinners (when he was gone, we ate a lot of vegetables and soup) to stilted family time playing Bible trivia. 

We finally sold the house toward the end of the school year, and the summer of 1990, we moved to Middletown, Ohio, just in time to start my senior year of high school. Moving from suburban Atlanta to a fading midwestern steel town took a lot of adjustment. Cold, snowy winter was a shock! And the pastimes that such winters encourage, such as card-playing and bowling, were things I’d never done or had much interest in. 

The move didn’t help my parents’ marriage–if anything, it was a catalyst for their dissolution. They would last two more years: the summer I came home from my first year of college, Mother left Dad for my brother’s sixth-grade teacher. But that’s another story.

This story is about the year I was sixteen, uprooted from a region and culture and geography that I knew well to one in which I felt like an alien. It didn’t help that Twin Peaks was on television then, a show that I not only watched religiously but consumed all media about. I had Laura Palmer’s diary, Agent Cooper’s book, and Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting soundtrack. This was the year that we read the Romantic Poets in English class, and I fell hard for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, too, saving up my allowance money for the Portable Coleridge (it was something like $15, which was a lot of money for a book in 1990). The nightmare landscapes I was consuming resonated with the simmering resentment that was flooding our household. That coupled with the prospect of AP exams and college admissions and the prospect of leaving home to go to college the next fall and start all over again making friends led to what I now recognize as frequent panic attacks.

At the time, I had no idea what was actually happening. Listening to the quiet chiming of the Twin Peaks soundtrack, a wave of adrenaline-heavy nausea would wash over me. My hands would freeze and my face would flame; I’d feel the oddest sense of disconnection from what was going on around me. Everything felt a bit off.  In my journal, I started calling these experiences my “existential illness,” as that was the best way that I knew how to describe it. I would occasionally stay home from school when the nausea became overwhelming, but in the pressure of my senior year, I mostly just kept grinding away at everything, hoping that with enough work, the anxiety would abate, and the weirdness would somehow go away.

There were some things that helped. I am grateful that I had started keeping a journal the year before, so I could write about the strange experiences I was having. I was glad to be able to vent to the page about how much I hated everything: my mother’s constant complaints, my dad’s reinvention as a small town booster, my classmates’ sitting and staring into space, completely unmoved by the words on the page in English class that were offering me such visions of what life could be like. (I mean, “The Second Coming,” y’all. That poem still makes me want to wave my hands in the air in response to the excitement that it stirs.)

I was already a fan of R.E.M. I’d convinced my parents to let me go with friends to see them play the Omni in Atlanta on their Green tour my sophomore year of high school. There’s bootleg video footage of that show on YouTube; watching it now, I realize how their 90-minute show set the bar really high for my subsequent expectations for concerts. That Monday at school, I wore the concert tee I’d bought with babysitting money to school; it seemed like everyone there had on an R.E.M. t-shirt. It was the one day of high school that I felt that I actually fit in.

After the move to Ohio, I listened to R.E.M. nearly constantly. The music was good, and smart, and it reminded me not only of these happy memories, but more generally of the place I considered home. The red clay weirdness of Georgia, with place names like Philomath. The speaker in “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” trying to convince his beloved to stay–that yearning resonated with me.

That fall in Middletown, as I worked on filling out my cassette collection, I bought their 1985 album Fables of the Reconstruction. I knew some of the songs already, like “Driver 8” and “Can’t Get There from Here,” from my VHS copy of R.E.M. Succumbs, their collection of music videos, and from Eponymous, their 1988 greatest hits collection. But much of the album was new to me: the minor chord melancholy of songs like “Wendell Gee” and “Kohoutek” spoke to me in a way that both reflected my own melancholy and reminded me of the landscapes that I missed.

But there was one particular song on Fables that was particularly resonant: “Maps and Legends.” On the “A Side” of the cassette just before “Driver 8,” something about the minor key pop sensibility and enigmatic lyrics connected with me. My sense of isolation at a new school, trapped in a culturally and geographically unfamiliar region, feeling lost amid my disintegrating family structure, I felt seen and validated by the song’s opening lyrics: 

He's not to be reached, he's to be reached
Called the fool and the company
On his own, where he'd rather be
Where he ought to be
And he sees what you can't see, can't you see that?

Sitting in my yellow-wallpapered room, feeling the weight of my calculus homework and the clouds of unhappiness that pervaded the entire house,  I felt both sad in my isolation and glad of my solitude. The lyrics seemed to echo that feeling.

When my anxiety-fueled feelings of disconnection would arise, I would listen to the song again and again. The song’s chorus seemed to provide some clues to a way out of my weirdness:

Maybe he's caught in the legend
Maybe he's caught in the mood
Maybe these maps and legends
Have been misunderstood.

I wasn’t so far gone as to think that Michael Stipe was sending a message directly to me or anything like that. However, the refrain of, “Maybe these maps and legends have been misunderstood” so resonated with my experience of reaching the end of high school, feeling my family falling apart, questioning so very much of what I’d taken for granted for most of my life: Religion. Politics. Values. Friendship. The meaning of “home.” 

Certainly, such questioning is pretty normal for a sixteen-year-old girl reaching the end of high school and about to leave home for the freedom of a college campus–and this was likely the source of some of my general anxiety and my specific attraction to the song. However, the physiological experience of panic attacks was not normal–and as my family drama amped up over the next couple of years, I appreciated anything that helped assuage the nauseated, vertiginous feelings of anxiety. The song seemed to reassure me that there might be different explanations for and ways of living in the world–I just needed to keep looking for them.

So. In December 2022–more than thirty years after I first took such comfort in these lyrics–I was living in Georgia again, but this time in Macon, Georgia, a much easier place to live than the Atlanta suburbs where I grew up. I was a college English professor who had published books and articles (including an article about author Flannery O’Connor’s influence on R.E.M.’s work), and I had discovered that Athens was an easy two-hour drive from where I lived (that didn’t even require driving through Atlanta).

I’d managed to get online and get a ticket to the Chronic Town tribute concert at the 40 Watt Club, an all-star show that sold out quickly. Organized by local musicians, the event raised money for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that support reproductive rights. The night of the show, I stood in line in the rain for 45 minutes before the doors opened, and this dedication allowed me to claim a space close to the stage.

The experience was epic; it’s in the top three or four best concert experiences that I’ve had. In addition to the legendary artists like Lenny Kaye, Mitch Easter, and Vanessa Briscoe Hay who performed, both Peter Buck and Mike Mills of R.E.M. joined in on several songs during the nearly three-hour show. Standing close enough to see Peter Buck’s hands play “Fall on Me” on his Rickenbacker was mind-blowing (especially since I’d been learning to play the guitar long enough that I could make some sense of what he was doing). Singing along with Mike Mills to the chorus of “Superman” was joyous.

And in the middle of it all, they played “Maps and Legends.” (I can’t find footage right now of it, but here’s footage from the second night of the concert, which took place at a much larger venue in Atlanta. Steve Wynn sings lead, and the band is rounded out by Scott McCaughey and Linda Pitmon.) I don’t listen to it that often, anymore, as there are other R.E.M. songs that I enjoy more: their country-inflected songs like “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” and “Driver 8” or their more rock and roll songs like “Harborcoat” or “Radio Free Europe.” And yet, when the Baseball Project–including both Peter Buck and Mike Mills–sounded those first few notes of “Maps and Legends,” I felt them deeply. In the midst of a joyous crowd at the fabled 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, hearing, “He’s not to be reached; he is to be reached” performed live–while standing perhaps ten feet from Mike Mills on the stage–had tears streaming down my face.

I was a 48-year-old woman with a Ph.D., who’d driven myself from my happy home in Macon where my husband was studying for his MLIS degree. I’d checked myself into a good hotel room and had dinner with a dear friend earlier that night. I was in a mythic dive bar that I’d been reading about for decades, dancing to music performed by musicians that I’d been admiring for decades, as well. As that song took me back thirty years to the anxiety and uncertainty of my Midwestern bedroom, I felt myself sending back a hopeful lifeline to my sad, teenage self. ”Hey, hang in there!” I shouted back along this tether in time. “It’s going to suck for a while, but you will get past it all. One day, you’ll be here, and this song will mean even more!”

I kept dancing and crying and experiencing the most wonderful catharsis throughout that song, feeling safe among hundreds of other music fans whom I am sure were experiencing their own travels through time. There are so many reasons why music plays such an important role in my life beyond being a balm and a catharsis–it’s a source of joy, curiosity, history, and even creativity, as I’m now learning to play instruments myself. However, its ability to comfort and to connect me to my past continues to be something that I am incredibly grateful for–particularly to R.E.M., who is responsible for so much of this comfort and joy.