Track 2: Map Ref. 41 deg N 93 deg W by Wire

When my mother died, My Dad began to fell walk obsessively.

The corporeality of my mother's illness, her weeping sores, her bodily fluid, sucked him down into confusion of feeling and detail.

Constantly climbing, he traversed and ascended, moving upwards from one valley to the next, seldom stopping or looking back.

Contour, scale, projection, relief.

My Dad loved certainty, clarity: the bigger picture.

As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a cartographer, rising above, skimming the world, travelling from triangulation point to triangulation point, making all topography.

Moraines, corries, cirques, tarns, crags: He'd point them out to me as a child, labelling the world.

Ignoring his body, he drank, falling asleep on the sofa, eliding to muscle and skin. When he wasn't walking, sensation escaped him.

"I just rise above it all, he said.

Climbing in dark winter, on high snowy ground, he was eaten by a hidden gash in the fell, the hills swallowing him. Returning to a glacial womb, his legs kicked in black ice water.

Pulling himself out on his elbows, freezing wind stole his breath.

He could have died.

He didn't tell me for years.

"I lost my way, he said. "I couldn't get my bearing.