Autism Vox

Traveling With, and Without, A Map

by Kristina Chew, PhD on June 10th, 2007

Charlie and I had something of a transportation adventure this afternoon that left me thinking that having “transport obsession” (as Asperger Square 8 calls it on a made-up book cover) can be more than a useful thing.

Once upon a time I was the kind of person who made it a point to have precise and exacting directions down to the turn, street name and landmark in order to get to anywhere. This meant that, if there were a traffic jam or I made a wrong turn or something else unexpected happened, I had to retrace my steps and go back to where I had been, and start over; I would rather wait an hour in a station for the next train, then take a different one and figure out how to alter my route. This insistence on “I can only go that way!” changed because of having to beat the clock to meet Charlie’s school bus: If there was a traffic jam inbetween me and my getting to my boy, I started to find myself pulling into side streets and trying out backroads to find some other way to go—-I had watched my husband Jim follow his sense of direction a thousand times and find some shortcut. No wonder Jim likes to study maps so much, I realized, and why we have so many maps for the various counties of New Jersey. There are also always a lot of train schedules for NJ Transit scattered around our house and falling out of Jim’s bag; Charlie has been known to secure some of these and array them on his bed.

Jim was up in the Bronx at a conference and Charlie was so eager to see him that he brought three of Jim’s blue and green coats in the car. The NJ Transit conductor was out of paper tickets and so I was not charged for part of the trip. We got out in Newark and discovered that there was a 40 minute wait—-my first thought was, we can take the PATH train to 33rd Street and catch the D train all the way up to the Bronx. This plan worked until we tried to board the uptown D train and discovered that it was not running all weekend. We would have to get to 59th Street via the A train, which was at a different location.

“Fish,” said Charlie as we entered Penn Station. I twisted my neck all around: Was there a seafood restaurant nearby? “Swedish fish,” said Charlie—-we had bought him a pack on our trip to Philadelphia last month—and Charlie carried the bag tightly as I tugged at his other hand on the way to the subway. The car was packed and we wedged ourselves in. “The train in front had its emergency break pulled and service is suspended” said the loudspeaker. “Open,” asked Charlie. “Let’s see if the train goes,” I said, mindful of the long ride ahead of us on the D train. Some people got off, most people stayed on, the train doors shut, and Charlie ate the red fish while we clanked up to 42nd Street, where a couple of NYPD officers got on and then the loudspeaker said, “The train in front had its emergency break pulled and…….” And everyone (except for the NYPD) got off.

“We’re not going to make it to the D train,” I said to Jim on my phone while Charlie finished the fish and ran back and forth in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. “No, you’re not going to he said.” And suggested we walk up 8th Avenue and get Charlie his favorite sushi dinner at Whole Foods.

Which Charlie and I did, and found ourselves taking the lone spot left opposite a white-haired women eating a bowl of salad. Charlie sat down right across from her, picked up the pickled pink ginger, and ate it before starting on the California rolls.

“Candied ginger is good too. I mix it with walnuts,” said the woman.

“That sounds good,” I said. “Honey, how about a fork?”, to Charlie.

“It’s kind of like raisins and peanuts. My mother used to make that,” said the woman. “Ginger and walnuts is better.”

“Ummmm,” I said, wiping up soy sauce. She asked how old Charlie was: “Ten years old,” said my boy, and went back to eating.

“He’s not into talking,” said the woman, not unkindly.

“Yeah,” I said and then, “he has autism.”

“I have my somethings too,” said the woman and went back to her salad. She raised a fork full of lettuce, arugula and mache sticking out like petals of an orchid. “Look what we got! Charlie, what is it?” Charlie was eating the last of his sushi; I smiled.

“A dragonfly?”

She looked at her fork and ate. And repeated the process, and was ignored by Charlie, and showed me the lettuce.

She is a sculptor, she told me; she teaches art; she builds houses (with a friend named Charlie, and she described his tool belt), “earth houses” she noted and I thought of how Charlie likes to poke the toes of his shoe in the dirt. She asked me if I knew when a furniture store closed (I did not) as she had to pick up something there and called them and then information and I called Jim and Charlie enjoyed a cupcake. She pointed out that the red on the cupcake’s frosting matched the red-violet of the radicchio I was eating. She was able to call the furniture store; she asked why Charlie was sitting on his knees and noted that her father had said she has “rubber bones”; she said she was 64 and wondered at what she might have. I smiled. She said she makes maps.

“You draw maps?” I asked.

“Well, not so much anymore, it’s all on the computer……”

“Maps are great,” I said.

We met Jim as Charlie and I walked south down 8th Avenue and Jim walked us down the West Side Highway, Charlie skipping and smiling, to New York waterways, and we rode a boat back across the Hudson. There would still be two more PATH trains and one more train to take, but it was something to be on the water, and Charlie kneeling backwards in his chair, easy with the boat’s bob and sway and with Jim back traveling with us, as was I—and also mindful of how Charlie and I had met someone who makes maps, who can turn the sprawling reality of a place into a system in a piece of paper, who has an internal visualization and understanding of where things are.

That is something I am indeed still learning.

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POSTED IN: Adulthood, Charlisms, Diagnosis, Food and Diet, New Jersey, Water