When I was young, Geography was a boring subject that covered little more than the capitals of the US states. If someone called Africa a country, I doubt they would have been corrected. Some schools today still don’t make the corrections that Africa is not a country, just as Europe and Asia are not countries. They are regions and continents with an array of countries within them. It stands to reason, then, that my love for Geography did not stem from my early schooling.

I was “geographying,” however, if I might make up that word, throughout my childhood, exploring land, wildlife, and people. I had a nifty rock collection where little specimens were pasted into boxes and their locations were noted. My brother and I dammed up the creek that ran down from the mountains and emptied into the Pacific Ocean at our Malibu beach house. That taught me early lessons in water flow and management. I found old arrowheads and artifacts from the early Chumash people of that area and pretended to be one of them as I hiked the hills and swam the waters. I relished the gifts my traveling grandparents and aunt brought back for me from what was generically called “The Orient” in the Fifties. And in my book, Landscapes of the Mind, I tell of the discarded black accordion file I found one day – a file containing pages torn from National Geographic, articles about peoples around the world, and maps of earthly places in addition to a chart of the solar system. I was in heaven...and became a convert of what became the field of Geography.

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