Ann Arbor, Mich.– From the sky, my old neighborhood in Brandon looks like a target. The houses are built around two concentric circles, with feeder streets coming in like crosshairs. On the inside circle, at the outer edge of the bullseye, is my parents' house.
I didn't intend for this to be a nostalgia trip.
But when I look down on our clean gray roof, I can't help but think of the two weekends I spent with my dad and brother hammering that thing down. I remember that the week between was a rainy one and we nearly ran out of pots, pans and buckets to catch the drips.
There is a classic and sort of outdated fear that satellite images could someday be the ultimate tool of Big Brother against the common citizen. After all, if the satellites can see us, they can also track us. But we shouldn't flatter ourselves. Most of us aren't important enough to warrant satellite surveillance. The Google maps are the closest we're likely to get.
For those who are afraid of even Google's prying eye, rest assured. The images here are virtually useless for voyeurism. Google's zoom function dead-ends at a comfortable level. Every street looks gray, every tree is a two-dimensional green circle and every roof is just a pixilated block of whatever color your shingles happen to be.
This, I think, is what makes searching the satellite maps so addictive. To see anything at all, you have to be able to imagine what you can't see in the picture. Then the memories kick in, and the nostalgia trip begins. That's why people all over the U.S. are using the maps to find their childhood homes, not peer into the neighbors' back yards.
After examining every pixel of my parents' house, I head for my home away from home: the movie theater.
Along the way, I pass an old orchard and remember the intoxicating scent of orange blossoms in the early spring. I remember when I used to drive by with my windows down, sniffing at the air for a half-mile until the smell finally disappeared behind my tailpipe. I loved doing that, and I miss it now.
The parking lot at AMC Regency 20 is mostly empty. And the image, too, is mostly vacant of any sense of nostalgia for me. It's not that I don't have memories of the theater. I spent most of my teen years there. But the theater I remember – the theater that has meaning for me – is a dark one. It's full of self-conscious kids on a Friday night jumping off benches, sneaking smokes and just generally straining for some sense of rebellion. That's what I did in high school. And it's what I watched other kids do when I went to see movies in college.
But we never did it in the daylight. This place, the theater on the Google map, isn't my theater. It's the theater for parents and retirees. So I keep moving.
And I'm moving fast now, headed for a quick trip downtown to take a look at how my old alma mater, Blake High School, is doing.
And it's click, slide, click, slide through east Tampa, the Port, Ybor. I quickly scan by Channelside to notice that a cruise ship is in. Then it's up Ashley, and across the river where it looks like the Blake High parking garage is full to the top level. A school day.
I imagine all the kids asleep on their desks down there; totally unaware that this would be the day the satellites came to snap an image for Google.
The companies that take these pictures have vast libraries of aerial images from around the world. Each one captures a specific moment in time, like this school day at Blake.
I call Google to ask how they chose which images to put in the map, and which to leave out.
Google spokesperson Barry Schnitt says the main factor in picking the map images is clarity. The moments we see captured are random.
"Some images … you'll see the trees are green and lush, so it was obviously in the spring or summer," he tells me. "And you'll move over and the trees will be bare, and so obviously that image was taken in the winter … but they'll be, you know, right next to each other."
This randomness helps explain the next anomaly on my Google tour. As I head north on I-275 and hang a right on Fowler, I come across a blurry blob of green and gray where USF is supposed to be. I zoom out, scroll down. The blob covers nearly the entire campus, plus Busch Gardens.
My first thought is: security reasons. We don't want the terrorists seeing the back driveways of Busch Gardens. Or USF's parking lots, or labs, or whatever the university has that's worth hiding. But then, why wouldn't MacDill Air Force Base get the blob treatment? It doesn't. Neither does the Port, TIA or really any other potential target in Tampa.
Schnitt blames technical difficulties.
"It could be as simple as, it was cloudy that day over there, over that area when they were making the satellite pass," he tells me. "I can't speak specifically to what might have happened there. I mean, it just varies as to what we have available for specific areas."
No matter what caused it, the blob hanging over USF is enough to kill my nostalgia buzz. Zoomed out, the image does take on some semblance of the campus, but this is hardly something to stir the imagination or conjure lost memories.
I wonder then, which is worse: overhead images that are so close, they reveal our private lives to prying eyes, or images that are so distant, they blur the physical details of our lives into insignificant swaths of green, blue and gray.
I say keep the cameras trained close.
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2005.