Mapping Personal Terrain

Chris Givens
Art of Crossing the Street
Personal Terrain Mapping
I was born and raised in Montclair NJ, a little suburb 12 miles west of Manhatten. The town like many suburbs has parks and the like but also has some county and state parks/ wild life reserves.

As a kid, I truly embraced nature, it was new, it was exciting, my imagination made it so that it was new every time, one day it’s foggy and I’m on Endor with a lightsaber, next day I’m with monkey’s in trees, if it’s really hot suddenly I’m with Indiana Jones. Then winter was even better, as a child interested in art, snow was the greatest thing ever for sculpting, and nature provides you with a near limitless amount of snow to sculpt with. Igloos, snow men, forts, snow balls, caves, anything was possible, once again I could be back in Star Wars, on Hoth with Luke (a lot of my childhood was defined by my obsession with Star Wars). But, slowly, as I grew up, I got lazier, my imagination wasn’t as whimsical as it once was, instead of making up my own adventures, I’d watch more movies, TV, read comics, and play video games. I stayed inside, got fatter, got paler, and lost a connection with nature.
That is until freshman year of high school. A new form of nature was introduced to me, this new form of nature unlocked that connection I used to have with nature as a whole. Marijuana brought me back to nature, for one to use it, it’s easiest to be outside,
and afterwords, that childlike wonderment of nature is brought back.

Mills Reservation. The smoke spot. Mills was a County Park/Reserve a few blocks from my house, and right behind my friend Charlie’s house. It was mostly forest land with paths and the like through it, but their were also large cliffs that over looked the Manhattan skyline, and our whole town. This place was magical, days, nights, hell even mornings, Mills was always there, always mysterious, always epic, and always a safe place to smoke weed.


I don’t want to be a stupid stoner or anything but quite seriously, the high from weed literally cast the world in a new light, suddenly lying in the grass made sense. Lying there watching the clouds go by, you slowly start to fade into the scene no longer are you just in a park, but your part of nature, the grass grows around you, the trees shoot up around you, nature was no longer just what wasn’t inside, it was part of you and you were part of it. The way the leaves blow, the way the light hits them, everything was beautiful, all framed by your vision. Hanging out in the park, pick up games of soccer, smoking in the shack in the woods off of the train tracks by the high school, standing on top of the falls in Cedar Grove, frisbee in the park instead of calculus, parties in back yards, nature made a heavy reentry into my life those 4 years.
Now, I’m here in Chicago, all blue, black, and grey. The only touch of nature I see is the lake (surrounded by cement) and Millennium Park, so sterile and well guarded it feels less like nature and more like an experimental green house (and I don’t mean that in a positive way). For now I just plot my return into nature, planning adventures to my grandfather’s cabin, camping with my brother, all from my dorm room looking outside to the freezing cold grey.