Our Land is Changing--Soon Yours Will Be Too (excerpt) | Sarah Lewison To draw San Francisco, put your left arm down on a piece of paper and trace around the edges, letting a fist form a peninsula, with the Bay on one side, the Pacific on the other. San Francisco is thus a protuberance around which other locations rotate.   On this map, the white space would be your fist. The third largest natural harbor in the United States, San Francisco Bay, is the knobby black band in the vertical center, bracketed by an ice-filled sea between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to the north, and to the south, a manmade passage upon which the west coast has been dependent for most of the past century. In this map, the Republic of Panama has been dragged northwards nearly to San Jose, and the Northwest and Nunavut Territories of Canada have been propped roughly above California's wine country. It is difficult to decipher the edges of these features, but there is more information where the land and water meet; here are ports, piers, and channels for maritime traffic, places of stopping and embarking, portals for consumption, loading and unloading. This emphasis upon trade recalls thematic maps in old encyclopedias in which colorful representations of agricultural goods are suspended over the geographical location of its source, maps of imperialist bounty. Without borders being demarcated, we can glean patterns, not in the forms themselves, but in the particularities of displacement and the distortions of scale.   By eliding vast swaths of geographic context, the map tests the implications of a neo-liberal dream of free trade in which the passage of commodities through porous borders magically converts everything to potential instruments of profit. History is hidden but the effects of power and the accumulated impacts of political and economic maneuvering have been applied to and grown into the land.   The landforms are unfamiliar and monstrous from a distance, but, in close up, subjected to identical logics of development, exploitation and design expediencies they might begin to look the same. This is a display of displacement, one that looses free the memory of where things once were.