The Map of Enough: One Woman's Search for Place

by Molly Caro May

Overview

Molly Caro May grew up as part of a nomadic family, one proud of their international sensibilities, a tribe that never settled in one place for very long. Growing up moving from foreign country to foreign country, just like her father and grandfather, she became attached to her identity as a global woman from nowhere. But, on the verge of turning thirty years old, everything changed.



Molly and her fiancé Chris suddenly move to 107 acres in Montana, land her family owns but rarely visits, with the idea of staying for only a year. Surrounded by tall grass, deep woods, and the presence of predators, the young couple starts the challenging and often messy process of building a traditional Mongolian yurt from scratch. They finally finish just on the cusp of winter, in a below–zero degree snowstorm. For Molly it is her first real home, yet a nomadic one, this one concession meant to be dissembled and moved at will.



Yurt–life gives her rare exposure to nature, to the elements, to the wildlife all around them. It also feels contrary to the modern world, and this triggers in Molly an exploration of what home means to the emergent generation. In today's age, has globalization and technology taught us that something better, the next best thing, is always out there? How does any young adult establish roots, and how do we decide what kind of life we want to lead? How much, ever, is enough?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619024748
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	01/13/2015
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Molly Caro May is the author of The Map of Enough and Body Full of Stars. She received a writing fellowship at the Taft–Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center, and her work has appeared in Salon, The Hairpin, Orion, and Fourth Genre. After living in six countries and eight U.S. states, she has now made a home in Montana, where she lives with her husband, two young daughters, and Great Dane mutt. Find out more at mollycaromay.com

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

Some say that the first ten years of life organize your entire perception of who you are. That’s a serious statement. I sat under a cottonwood tree, wind rustling the grass by my legs, and thought it out. But not for long, because how could I not agree right away? That young girl had occupied a literal present tense in me for my entire adult life. No matter where I went. She would surface in my memory with flashbacks that cued during the most common moments—
buying cucumbers at the grocery store, petting my dog on the porch, filling my car with gas in the middle of nowhere. She spoke as if she were still alive, and always close. Maybe that girl was bolder than me. Maybe I wanted to retain her. Her stories certainly populated my body. And she always appeared when
I needed her most—somehow her presence overshadowed, for an instant, the many small disappointments of self that had amassed over time to make me feel unwarranted.

Under the cottonwood tree, I unlaced my shoes to let my feet go free.

When my father walks down the rolling lawn towards me, I unlace my roller skates and step onto the driveway. We are visiting from abroad—the word my parents use, which must mean that where we live is foreign to us even though this place, my grandparents’ house on the Chesapeake Bay, feels more foreign to me. The air here smells of salt, of heat, of mowed grass. Everyone else is lounging up the hill by the house probably eating Triscuits and cheese. That’s what we do when we come here, and we also play with the Russian dolls and page through all the old maps. My father puts a hand on my shoulder, crouches down to eye level, and asks if he can talk to me. Before I say Yes, I test my almost double digits self and wait a few long seconds just to feel what would happen if I said No. It’s about a new job, he explains. Oh, that’s familiar. It’s the next line that throws me. In a few months, we will be moving to America. Because I don’t know how to absorb this information, I scream at him.

I hate America!

I run away hard, my feet, still in white socks, slapping across the black asphalt. At the old dock, I collapse onto rough planks. Even though I like moving, moving to America is going to ruin everything. I don’t know exactly why. I just know it’s true. Hot tears run down my already flushed cheeks. But the humid air eventually pulls me upright and my legs dangle out over the green water and I am watchful. The peninsula spreads out to nowhere, but I don’t know that word peninsula yet, or that the long bird coasting by is a blue heron or that the capital of America, which people really call the United States of America, is forty-five minutes away or that there is a state with the same name as the capital, only it’s on the other coast, the rainy one. My grandparents, the ones who live here now, aren’t even from here. They grew up as Americans in Chile and raised my father while moving from Hawaii to Japan to Germany to Montreal to Belgium to England. And so far, my father has chosen for us the same wandering life: from Australia to the Dominican Republic to Spain to Mexico and now, to America.

The crab cage stares at me. It hangs over the water. Piled on top of one another, the crabs are oblivious to chaos and also to their future. This afternoon, when my cousins and second cousins come over, while ears of corn boil in pots, we will paint black numbers on the crabs’ shells, line them up like prisoners, and make them race down the scalding driveway. My two younger brothers can’t wait for the awesome event. I end up chewing my fingernails.

Reaching into the cage, I dodge the clacking of claws andfeel brave.

One by one, I pull crabs out and fling them into the still water.

Plunk. Plunk. Plunk.

I agree with the sound of freeing crabs. They splash. They descend into the murk. Into the seaweed and sand. Float on their backs. Legs splayed out. Bellies white as ghosts. As the crabs go back to their element, my pigtails feel too tight and, suddenly, I’m not sure where I am from and it feels like the most urgent question of my life. Soon I’ll be sitting in a classroom where a teacher will hand me the white crisp sheets of an entrance test. I will learn how to fill in ovals with a #2 pencil and also that I need to repeat a grade because I have no answer for how many coins get dropped into a tollbooth. I don’t know what a tollbooth is. I don’t know about American quarters or nickels, even though, by lineage, I am American.

Table of Contents

Prologue xiii

Part 1

1 Here I Am 3

2 The Walls Go Up and Down and Eventually Up 35

3 Animals and Acceleration 69

Part 2

4 Hawthorns, Ice, Others 105

5 The Story I Told Myself 139

6 White Picket Fence Girl 167

Part 3

7 This Is the Place 199

8 A Running Chapter 231

9 The Deer Speaks 261

Coda 287

Acknowledgments 291

Editorial Reviews

"The story of a young couple's year on family land in Montana, building a yurt. Wonderful feeling for the land and its wildlife, and a compelling story of the couple's adventures in yurt building, living on the land, and how the year changes them."—Georgiana, Magnolia's Bookstore, Seattle, WA

"The Map of Enough offers readers a richly considered perspective and, for many, a glimpse of a sweet settled life lived far away." —Orion Magazine

"The Map of Enough is moving, poetic, and addictive. May's sense of wonder at her new world and adventurous spirit is admirable and contagious, but even more important is the way she inspires us to question our own deeply–held beliefs about home and happiness."—Elle

"a more homegrown version of Eat, Pray, Love [...] readers will find much to ponder in this journey to home and family. An obvious choice for book groups eager for rich discussions on the road less traveled." —Booklist

"In an impressive debut memoir, a self–proclaimed "Woman of the World" chronicles her journey to find a home. May joins the ranks of Gretel Ehrlich and Annie Proulx, celebrants of sagebrush, big skies, and journeys of self–discovery… May's poetic, gleaming prose makes palpable the wildness and wind, freezing and thawing earth, delicate fragrances of grass and budding trees—and her own profound transformation." —Kirkus Starred

"More than a story of building an adobe, it's about yurt life and its connections to nature and the elements, and offers keys to understanding the lure of a nomadic home that can be disassembled and moved at the blink of an eye. Any interested in mobile living and yurts will find this an inspirational, revealing autobiography packed with insights and encouragement." —The Midwest Book Review

"Could a wanderer learn to stay put without stagnating? Could a woman brought up without survival skills learn to build her own shelter, split firewood, grow food? Could a browser of the Internet keep from drowning in the electronic sea of possibilities? Could she learn to be fully present to her life without hankering to be elsewhere? Molly Caro May tackles all these questions, and more, in prose as candid and lucid as an April morning. She holds the hard–won answers lightly, open to correction from fresh experience." —Scott Russell Sanders, Earth Works: New & Selected Essays.

"In her beautifully written memoir [May] explores the challenge and allure of creating a real home in an age of ever–more–virtual interactions – and reminds us why we love the West."—Sunset Magazine

From the Publisher

11/11/2013
May’s chronicle of dropping out with her fiancé from the canyons of New York City for the remote grassy basin near Bozeman, Mont., delineates a year of soul-searching and yurt construction by the couple. The pair resolve to construct by their own hands a Mongolian-style dwelling on the 107 acres situated at the base of the Gallatin Range that belong to May’s parents. May tends toward a nomadic temperament, while her partner, Chris, a carpenter, is grounded and taciturn. Their work evolves organically as they tackle the construction just in time for their first winter: from sawing and treating the wood slats (khar mod) that make up the walls to hauling the wood-burning stove and sewing the huge sheet of white canvas that will serve as cover. There are visits by citified family and friends, occasional spottings of elk herds and a mountain lion, and securing of a rescue dog, Bru. Throughout, May ruminates seemingly endlessly over the elemental question: “How do we choose to live?” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2013-11-11
In an impressive debut memoir, a self-proclaimed "Woman of the World" chronicles her journey to find a home. May, who has worked as barista, conservationist, teacher and vegetable farmer, joins the ranks of Gretel Ehrlich and Annie Proulx, celebrants of sagebrush, big skies and journeys of self-discovery. The author grew up a traveler: Her parents moved frequently, and when asked where she came from, May would respond, proudly and defiantly, "I am from nowhere." A move to the Gallatin River Valley of Montana with her fiance fed a new restlessness to discover a place she could call home and, even more importantly, to discover if rootlessness defined her. On 107 acres of land owned by her parents, the couple decided to build a yurt, a traditional Mongolian structure of bent wood covered with canvas, providing "a thin membrane" of shelter from owls, coyotes and a slinking mountain lion. They finished the painstaking project just before the snows began. Shrouded by the hushed winter landscape, May felt herself quieted, and she honed a new skill: "Learning silence in order to hear your own truth." Instead of having no roots, she decided she, too, had been shaped by the places where she had lived --"a lineage of worldliness"--places essential to her identity that she did not need to travel constantly. While her friends wondered when she would take to the road with a new map, she settled into the tasks of day-to-day survival: planting, reaping, sweeping, cooking: "Some whole days," she writes, "could be spent taking simple care." May's poetic, gleaming prose makes palpable the wildness and wind, freezing and thawing earth, delicate fragrances of grass and budding trees--and her own profound transformation.

Kirkus Reviews