Maps are the traveler's bibles. We live by them, swear by them, sing their praises. We gaze lovingly at them, letting our imaginations soar over their landscapes.

I don't learn geography from maps, though. I learn geography with my feet. If I've been to a place, the geography is imprinted. If I haven't been there, I can stare at all the maps in the world. They mean nothing. Before I went to the Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, I knew there were three little countries up "that way." I'd actually known an Estonian woman, a science teacher, but that didn't help me visualize where she came from. I never remember which South American countries our Spanish professors come from. I've been to Costa Rica and Peru. Everything else is a blur.

Travelers don't mistake the maps for territory because we know what territory feels like. We've been to territory and it smells different.

"Man has invented three suberb means of communication - language, music and maps, maps being the oldest of the three," said the introduction to the atlas in the glove compartment in our little red rented Mazda on an unspoiled island in the Baltic Sea off Estonia. The oldest? I wondered. People without language drawing maps in the dirt with their fingers.

Maps can save us. Maps, clutched, smoothed lovingly out, diligently consulted, can useless, or worse, they can be misleading. As a traveler, a map is my constant companion, more constant than my husband.

In Holland, after the ferry across the Ij River, JF and I got pleasurably lost, in a hilarious round of asking directions and never getting the same answer twice. One guy told us three completely different answers. We never did manage to get a proper biking map.

One German lady of a certain age (who looked in spirit exactly like my feisty 90-year-old Aunt Ruth) told us that many Germans come to Klaipeda, Lithuania because their grandparents or parents were born here. The "return to one's roots" phenomenon.

"Why," she asked, "are you here?"

"Because it was on the map," JF answered, to which she roared with laughter.

In Estonia, in the rain, I found the best map I've ever seen, tucked cheerfully into the glove compartment of the car. We were supposed to have rented motor scooters, but when we got up, it was raining.

At 9:30, it was a pouring rain, all-day, insistent, gray-sky-low-clouds rain. To my dismay, I could just see the day unfolding-reading in bed until noon, walk downtown to THE restaurant in town for lunch, back for more reading and listening to the rain. I couldn't stand the thought. Saaremaa was supposed to be a beautiful island, nature, a rustic way of life, windmills, seashore. And because of the rain...again...I wasn't going to see any of it. We would leave on the bus tomorrow and I'd have seen the inside of my blinking hotel room plus one or two eateries within walking distance.

We had a row about it. I wasn't gracious. I cursed the infernal weather and my husband's seeming inability to rise above it. He cursed my infernal need to be doing something, going somewhere, accomplishing instead of Being. I thought of just buying the damned raingear and renting a scooter anyway. He dismissed this as idiotic. I proposed checking the Yahoo Satellite map for a place in Europe without rain and then just getting on the next bus and the next one until we got there. He was perfectly willing to do that. He preferred his book.

"Okay," I offered, a last gasp, desperate proposition. "Let's rent a car."

"Spend 56 European Euros?" he retorted. "That's 56 American dollars. Are you crazy? Do you think we're made of money?"

Other people rent cars. We do not. But I didn't want to miss Saaremaa. My guidebook said that the island during the Soviet era was closed to foreigners and that Estonians needed special permits to come here because of an early warning radar system and rocket base. Consequently, according to the book, this is what Estonia would be like if the Russians hadn't invaded. Unspoiled.

"Damn the money," I told him.

The car, a little red Mazda was gorgeous. We zipped back to the hostel to pick up the picnic lunch we'd bought at the grocery store, I spread the map out over my knees and prepared to NAVIGATE!

I spent the first half hour just learning how to read all the information in this Estonian Atlas, but then it was just a dream. It had peat bogs, cliffs, open land, bus stops, GPS coordinates, manor houses, windmills, castles, boat landings, and even sacred stones! Along with red roads and oops, yellow roads, which are gravel.
About that time, we bumped onto gravel. We drove to the tip of the peninsula, stood in the wind off the sea and watched seven swan couples dipping their long necks beneath the waves, up and down. Wild swans. The wreakage from the fierce WWII fighting on this coast was everywhere, half bunkers, machine gun slits slanting into the water. Blue wild flowers waving, swallows swooping, gulls screaming.

The houses on this part of the island, each one with its own little black square on the map, were few and far between. Living out there must be like living in remote parts of Alaska, something silent and fierce, something that feeds on windsweep and salt air and no one for miles. The houses were wooden, painted green or dark red or-most often-baby poop yellow-brown. Wide bogs and rocky beaches and cliffs that had signs about how much history could be read in the layers. A lot. Another swan colony. A wrong turn down to a pier and four open fishing boats moored there. The road muddy and slippery in places, so that I got bursts of fear-images of getting stuck and nobody for miles. The little red car just kept chugging though, past wooden windmills and stone fences. A fox crossed the road in front of us. Alaska was like this for miles and miles, this flat, this windswept, this lonely, this beautiful...

We got off the peninsula and started seeing villages again, little clusters of wood frame houses and stone fences and picket fences. Sheep in the compounds and fruit trees.
"This is the way my grandmother lived," a New Zealand traveler said about her trip into the countryside. My own grandmother lived in Alabama, where it never rained that much at once and if July ever saw temperatures that low, they'd have KNOWN the Lord was about to end the world. But I could see this peasant life for her, the one cow, the constant farm work, the town something far off and only occasional.
The wonderful map had bus stops marked in tiny red letters, so all day I kept track of where we were from bus stop to bus stop. Near the city, they looked alike, just open shelters, but out in the country, they were like little individual masterpieces, with doors that close and each one looking only like itself. I could imagine curtains on the windows of some, with a tiny little stove inside for those long winter waits for the country children.

Coming back to civilization, the big city of Kuressaare, we stopped at a road house with a red sign called Artek, completely unprepared for what we discovered. It was a bar, restaurant and dance hall on weekends, devoted to a tongue-in-cheek, ironic homage to Communism. Honest. There were Communist flags draped down the center of the room, newspapers from the Communist era and paper money decoupaged into tabletops and bathroom walls. There were several bookshelves with Russian tomes extolling Lenin, busts of Lenin. The disk jockey's stand was backed with Russian Army uniforms, a gas mask draped over one and a cap over another. The waitresses wore Red Army jackets. There was a samovar, flags from the sailing Olympics in Tallinn before independence, even an old phone from the era.

I talked to the owner, a pleasant woman in her mid-thirties, who told me that Artek was a Soviet summer camp in the Ukraine for the very top athletes and students, "only the very best." She was 25 when the Soviets moved out, old enough to know about Artek, though she never got to go. The walls of the restaurant had diplomas and certificates issued by the Soviets. And there was an enormous mural showing the struggling Communists in battle, pushing on to victory. Weird for us, this nostalgic-sarcastic approach to Communism, sort of like a night club with a McCarthy era black list theme. I had October Revolution meat dumplings and JF had Capitalist sausages and sauerkraut.

It never did stop raining until we got back to town. We did the wooden windmills photo op in the rain, 14th century gothic church in the rain, and quaint north island town in the rain. It rained particularly hard during our 7500 year-old-crater visit. The Kaali crater looks like a wimpy little lake with some man-made mounds to keep the water in, but it isn't. It is the site of a wild-ass meteorite landing, one so spectacular that it has been handed down in Estonian mythology as the Sun's Grave. This, the story goes, is why the Estonians are blessed by God, since He chose this very spot for the burial place of the sun. There were many conflicting theories about this hole in the ground until the early 20th century, when geological analysis of the fragments of meteorite confirmed the hypothesis that it was one massive chunk of metal that went boom. We are talking 1000 tons on entry into the earth's atmosphere and 80 tons when it finally hit. It was going about 10-20 km per SECOND when it landed.

After dinner, the sun briefly showed up. JF admitted that it had been a really good day, that we never would have discovered Artek without the car and that it was worth every Euro we put into it. I admitted that I would have been miserable had we attempted a tour by motorscooter. The minute I realized the map's yellow roads were all gravel and mud, we'd have turned around, completely missing the swans, the fox and the feeling of the Far North.

"After tomorrow morning," I wrote in my journal, "we will be hard traveling, just moving and moving and moving down the map."

The territory may not be the map, but the metaphor of moving down the map means getting down the real road.