deep maps

"How a world is imagined and lived in begins with 'maps' far more profoundly ingrained that those of the cartographer.  It includes a deep sense of home and of the familiar places likened to it.  It also includes a sense of the distant and unfamiliar.  Mapping the known world has always included, at its periphery, the unknown world, terra incognita, which the imagination may conceive as shadowy and frightful or as golden and glorious."  Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography

Paul Bunyan & Babe the Big Blue Ox: Bemidji, MN

I'm finding this book fascinating for what it is teaching me about India, for what it is showing me about the relationships between human beings, our collective identities, and landscape, and for what it is causing me to wonder about these dynamics in North America where our shared mythology is so young.  Indian identification of sacred places (fords, crossing points), of dwellings of the divine, and routes of pilgrimage are many centuries old.  The mythology and the landscape are intricately tied by repeated rituals and long memory.

It may be that individual Americans and perhaps their closest family and friends have a few decades or even a century of layering, but as a people our mythological mapping is more thin than deep.  Nonetheless, I'm curious about what there is and how it is developing.  How might family vacations to national and state parks be understood within this framework?  Do historic landmarks play a part?  What of those odd, local markers and annual town festivals, like the Defeat of Jesse James Day here in my town?  What would be learned from paying serious attention to these roadside attractions?