John Dever of Bath couldn’t help notice that the world sort of shrunk last year.
In May 2020, his family was scheduled to make its yearly trip to Quebec City, in Canada, probably the last one before the eldest of his two sons went off to college. His son, Griffin, was also scheduled that year to take a school trip to Eastern and Central Europe – which cost about $2,500 – and had worked hard to save the money. Both trips were canceled because of the pandemic.
So when Dever, a social studies teacher at Morse High School, read that the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education in Portland was collecting stories for an exhibit on the havoc COVID-19 wreaked on travel plans, he emailed a description of his family’s plight. His story ended up inspiring one of the maps in the exhibit, “Where Will We Go From Here? Travel in the Age of COVID-19,” which is on display at the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine now through Oct. 15.
“I know it’s nothing compared to the suffering so many people endured, but to have the world forcibly shrunken like this was difficult,” said Dever, 55. “As parents, we’ve always thought it’s important for our boys to travel as part of their education, to get out and see the different ways people live.”
CONNECTING WITH HISTORY
The exhibit, which opened in May, was an opportunity to use historic maps from the library’s collection to put a focus on a contemporary event, said Libby Bischof, the executive director of the map library. It was also an opportunity for the map library to put together its first crowd-sourced exhibit.
Library staff put out a call for stories from around Maine and beyond. More than 150 people shared the tales of…