Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (10 page)

Chapter 4
BENCHMARKS

n
.:
brass disks set in concrete to indicate elevation,
used as a reference for topographical surveying

This information
is what we need, you know. This shows history
and how people fit the places they occupy. It’s about what gets erased
and what comes to replace it. These maps reveal the foundations
behind the ephemera.

—BARRY LOPEZ

T
o enter the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, you need to mess with Texas: set in the tile floor of the entryway is a circular detail from a geologic map of the Lone Star State. That’s not an accident, according to map division chief John Hébert, a proud Louisiana native. “If anyone wants to, I encourage them to”—here his mild Cajun accent breaks off, and he makes a show of stamping his feet on the map, using the Texas Hill Country to dust off his shoes. Apart from the Texas-bashing twinkle in his eye, Hébert is a serious-looking sixtysomething man with round bifocals and a shock of wavy white hair above his oft-knitted brow. His eyebrows, though, still have a little pepper mixed in with the salt. We cross the patrons’ reading room and pass through a secure set of doors at the other end. “You’re in my world now,” he says.

Hébert’s world, located in the basement of the library’s James Madison Building, is a row of metal map cases so long it momentarily takes my breath away. I always feel a certain sense of reverence in
libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless Internet users. Being so close to so much laboriously gathered information gives me a strange satisfaction with the scope of human ingenuity, the way other people might feel visiting Hoover Dam or the Great Wall of China. But this library is different from any I’ve ever seen, a seemingly endless expanse straight out of a Borges story. I can follow the fluorescent-lit lines of shelves almost to a single vanishing point in each direction. There are 8,500 of these cases, with five drawers per case, two entire football fields just for maps. And they’re heavy, which is why we’re two stories underground. “We have to be on this floor,” explains Hébert, “because if we were on the sixth floor, we’d be down here pretty soon anyway.” It’s the largest map collection ever assembled in human history.

Maps have been Hébert’s passkey to a larger world ever since he was a boy growing up in the bayou country. He and his older brother stretched a ham radio antenna out the bedroom window in their Houma, Louisiana, home and attached it to a tree in the vacant lot next door, and he spent hours tapping away at the transmitter in Morse code. “I’d always have an atlas on my lap,” he remembers. “Because all of the sudden I’d be talking to Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, and where the hell is Tamaqua, Pennsylvania? Where is it?” As he tells the story, his finger traces a highway on an imaginary road atlas. But when he arrived at Georgetown to work on his master’s degree in 1965, there was no geography department—those had been unfashionable for more than a decade. He studied Latin American history instead and was already working for the Library of Congress by the time he received his doctorate in 1972. He’s been here ever since.

Most of Hébert’s staff of forty-five librarians aren’t professional geographers—they came to love maps by seeing the power of cartography in their own fields, whether that was art history or public affairs. Hébert was no different. “Maps drew out points of history that the text wouldn’t tell me,” he says.

Indeed, history seems to be all around us as we begin to trek through the geographically arranged stacks: first world maps, then (from north to south): Canada; the United States in the order of its appearance, from the Atlantic to the Pacific; Latin America; then
across the Atlantic to Europe and Asia; and then Africa and Oceania at the far end of this cavernous space. It’s the world in miniature, and Hébert displays a missionary zeal in showing off his beloved collection not as some dry scholarly archive but as a vast treasure trove of Americana, from the earliest days of Spanish exploration to the present. There are maps of the Brazilian rain forest drawn by Theodore Roosevelt himself, during his nearly fatal expedition down the “
River of Doubt
” in 1913. There’s Welthauptstadt (“World Capital”) Germania, Albert Speer’s plan for a monumentally redesigned Berlin, recovered by American troops when Nazi Germany fell. There are the original maps that divided Europe at the end of World War I, brought back from Versailles by the American Geographical Society team that accompanied Woodrow Wilson there. “We have the original military maps from the Battle of Chapultepec and charts from the Barbary Coast War,” boasts Hébert, “so I can honestly say we have the halls of Montezuma
and
the shores of Tripoli.” If there’s a History Channel special on it, it’s in here.

Just about every luminary in history, it seems, makes a Mylar-covered cameo appearance in the Map Division’s shelves. As he shows me around, Hébert is dropping so many famous names that he starts prefacing them with the faux-humble-sounding disclaimer “a man called”—“a man called Stonewall Jackson,” “a man called Ferdinand Magellan.” At one shelf, he points offhandedly to a high drawer. “I have Lewis and Clark in there,” he says, alarmingly. Seemingly at random, he opens another drawer and shows me a colonial map of Alexandria, Virginia, before the town was even built. It’s an unremarkable survey listing the names of local landowners, and I’m not quite sure why I’m looking at it. People sure did have nicer handwriting back then, I guess. Then I see on an indexing sticker the mapmaker’s name: a young Virginia surveyor who later went on to other things. George Washington. I feel a little twinge of vertigo—not just that I’m holding
in my hands
a map personally drawn by The Father of His Country, Mr. First President, Ol’ Ivory Teeth himself, but also that this priceless artifact is sitting seemingly unnoticed in a nondescript drawer (“Virginia 3884.A”), lost among dozens of similar maps.

The number of mind-blowing items like this one in the library’s collection is powerful testimony to the omnipresent
Zelig
-like role that maps have played, always just behind the scenes, in the history of the world. I already described how Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.
^*
Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The
Apollo 11
crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.

The Library of Congress has had maps in its collection since its founding under President John Adams; in fact,
the library’s very first shipment
of books, purchased in London in 1801, included three maps and an atlas. There were one hundred maps in the library, then located in the U.S. Capitol, when the original collection was burned during the War of 1812. Today the collection holds more than five and a half million maps and more than eighty thousand atlases, and Hébert, though choosy about acquisitions—“we don’t buy crap,” he assures me—is still adding between sixty and eighty thousand new maps every year.

They come from everywhere. The library has offices in Cairo, Islamabad, Jakarta, Nairobi, New Delhi, and Rio scouring the world for maps. “We don’t know what’s going to come through our door,”
says Hébert. “We have languages you’ve never seen before.” Every map submitted for copyright in the United States automatically joins the collection. And by law, every time a U.S. government agency prints a map, it must deposit a copy with the Library of Congress—and these maps are generally free of copyright, since your taxes financed them, making them a remarkable publicly held resource. The best-known government maps are probably the United States Geological Survey’s “quadrangle” topographic maps, whose pale green forests and bubbly brown contour lines are permanently etched into the subconscious minds of generations of hikers. The USGS began this series after World War II—in an echo of their military origins, the green woodland areas on the maps are still officially defined as “
cover for small detachments
of troops”—but it wasn’t completed until 1992. Today these maps depict every creek, every ridge, and every grove of trees in the fifty states in remarkable 1:24,000 detail, each mile of territory measuring almost three full inches on the map. If you were to lay out the whole country in quadrangle map form—even the blank blue maps representing the middle of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which probably aren’t ordered much—it would stretch
783 feet by 383 feet
, the area of three city blocks.

But the USGS is far from the only federal agency that makes maps. In 2000, the Library of Congress was contacted by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sounds like a made-up group from
24
or
Alias
but is actually the mapping arm of the Department of Defense. The NGA had 360,000 map sheets sitting in a vault in Arizona that it wanted to get rid of, so Hébert sent a staffer down to take a look. It turned out to be a gold mine: 40 percent of the maps were new, so they were brought back to the library for filing. Among the stuff the NGA had relegated to its yard sale: 1:50,000 coverage of Afghanistan (that’s amazing detail, a little over an inch to a mile) that no one thought they’d need anymore. But after September 11, 2001, says Hébert, it didn’t take long before the Defense Department was knocking at his door, wondering if maybe the Library of Congress didn’t have any good tactical maps of Afghanistan, please . . . ? America’s heroic map librarians saved the country’s bacon yet again.

The Geography and Map Division serves a broad range of patrons.
Some requests are vitally important to national security, as in the case of the Afghanistan maps. Hébert says the State Department has lately been checking out lots of ethnological maps of Iraq over time—where have the Sunnis and Shiites historically lived? What about the Kurds? (Sigh. Better late than never, I guess.) Other governmental requests are a lot less urgent: the most common request from members of Congress is for a classy, sepia-toned historical map of their district that they can hang in their office. Or they might want area maps to help them understand some issue in their home state: natural resources on an Indian reservation, for example, or sex offenders living near elementary schools. If all politics is local, so is all geography—to someone, anyway.

You need to be a high-ranking official to be able to check stuff out from the Geography and Map Division or any other part of the nation’s library. But even if you don’t plan on running for Congress or getting appointed to the Supreme Court anytime soon, you can still get a library card there. Anybody can. It’s called a Reader ID and it’s free, and cardholders can look at maps in the reading room to their hearts’ content. Most of the patrons here today, quietly turning atlas pages, are private researchers of one kind or another. When the division began scanning its maps and putting them on the Internet in 1995, they started with what the history buffs wanted: the Civil War, then the railroads, then the American Revolution, then World War II. More than twenty thousand maps and charts are now viewable online. My favorites are the panoramic maps, beautiful bird’s-eye lithographs of American cities and towns that were fashionable at the turn of the last century. A print of Augustus Koch’s 1891 panoramic view of Seattle, reproduced from the Library of Congress’s copy, hangs above my piano at home.

But Hébert’s most frequent request isn’t so scholarly. “Most of the time we’re getting people who think treasure maps exist,” he says with a rueful smile.

Boy’s-own-adventure pirate maps, with carefully counted paces from the gnarled tree to the big X on the sandy island shore, were a big part of my childhood love affair with maps. “
Are
treasure maps real?” I ask eagerly.

Hébert has evidently had some experience answering this question without popping the bubbles of wide-eyed kids and gullible get-rich-quickers. “I’d say it’s very hard to say that they are,” he hedges.