Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (24 page)

Today the club boasts more than two thousand members, and this holiday prime rib luncheon is its biggest annual shindig. I was looking forward to hobnobbing with these modern-day explorers, spiritual descendants of Francis Beaufort and Robert FitzRoy—preferably someplace with a roaring fire and wildebeest heads on the wall. But my safari fantasy was rudely interrupted when Klaus filled me in on the club’s regular luncheons. “They used to be dinner banquets, but then some of our members heard about freeway shootings in L.A. Most of them don’t really like to drive at night.”

So let me get this straight: these intrepid explorers have been to Kamchatka and the Galápagos, but they won’t brave the 405 after
dusk? That’s when I first realized who has the time and money to visit one hundred countries: the very rich and/or (usually “and”) the very old. Looking around the restaurant, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the “Century” part of the club’s name might refer to its members’ ages. There are plenty of the Orange County furs, pearls, and face-lifts that you’d expect.
^*

And yet . . . most of these senior citizens have probably been to more cool places in the last year than I have in my whole life. Sixty-something Louise McGregor just drove across Ethiopia on a twelve-hour bus trip and apparently caused a bit of a ruckus on a Mogadishu runway. You can’t say they’re not adventurers.

“How many countries have
you
been to?” she asks me, having ascertained that I’m merely a curious interloper and not a club member.

Uh-oh. I’d been doing a mental count in the car on the way here. I feel like a reasonably well-traveled guy, having lived on three continents. And yet my total is a dispiriting twenty-four—and that’s counting a ninety-minute layover in the Taipei airport, as well as the time I stuck my foot across into the North Korean side of a conference room during a high school field trip to the DMZ.

“Twenty-nine,” I lie, rounding up to the nearest, uh, prime.

Louise is taken aback. “What are you doing writing a book about geography if you’ve only been to twenty-nine countries?”

Touché. In this room, at least, I’m freakishly provincial. But I wonder if Louise isn’t onto something: could America’s infamous lack of map savvy have something to do with our reluctance to travel overseas? After all, it’s hard to care much about a place you’ve never visited and know you probably never will, and a shockingly small slice of America even has a passport.
^†
Sarah Palin made headlines for not owning a passport as late as 2006, when she needed one to visit U.S.
troops in Kuwait and Germany. When Katie Couric asked her why not, she boasted that she wasn’t one of those idle, privileged college students who got whisked off to Europe with a backpack. “
I’ve worked all my life
,” she said. “I was not a part of, I guess, that culture.” Is this what we’ve become, a country where an interest in occasional travel is a
culture—
and a suspiciously un-American trust-fund kind of culture at that—rather than a familiar part of middle-class life?

At lunch I’m the youngest person at my table, by an easy forty-year margin. Eighty-seven-year-old Bill Crawford, buttering a roll to my left, just got back from Greenland. (“How was it?” “It was cold!”) He’s a dapper fellow in tweeds, a turtleneck, and a trim white beard. His interest in faraway places was born at age fifteen, when he saw Clark Gable in
Mutiny on the Bounty.
“I said, ‘Someday in my life I’m going to visit Pitcairn Island’ “—where the
Bounty
mutineers wound up—“ ‘and get to know the people.’ Well, last year I bought a house there.”

When Bill was seventy, he celebrated by buying a Harley and putting 65,000 miles on it, crisscrossing the continent. His plan is to travel until he’s 110—“When you rest, you
rest
!” he says, implying with grim emphasis that the second “rest” is of the “rest in peace” variety—but his eyesight, failing from glaucoma and macular degeneration, is starting to slow him down. He’s philosophical, though. “What will be, will be, but I’ll muddle through. I’m not going to worry about it. If it happens, it happens.” He grins and elbows me, winking one clouded eye. “Like going out on a date, right?”

Klaus Billep, the chairman, is taking care of some club business at the front of the room. (“Hold the microphone closer to your mouth!” one hard-of-hearing oldster in the back exhorts him.) The award for traveling the farthest to get to today’s luncheon is given to a band of hardy club members who have just returned from Wake Island. This tiny coral atoll between Hawaii and Guam is a heavily guarded U.S. missile site, and the military clearances involved in planning a visit make it one of the hardest-to-reach places in the world. In fact, of the 141 visitors who made the trip, five were TCC members crossing off
the very last item on their checklist of destinations. Excited gasps and a spontaneous ovation rise from the room.

Klaus also gives honorable mention to “a gentleman eighty-six years young who drives all the way from Fresno every year.” Rod Ritchie, sitting on the other side of me, raises his hands high above his head to greet the applause. “Still among the living!” he crows.

“Age is in your mind,” Rod tells me. “When you’re my age, you realize that most of your friends and colleagues are dead. And I didn’t want the trailer behind my hearse to be filled with money; I wanted to spend it! So I started traveling.” A friend told him about the TCC, and they started comparing country counts. “That was like a disease he gave me,” he chuckles ruefully.

There certainly does seem to be something addictive about the disease of country collecting—some practitioners call themselves “country baggers,” as if entire nations were elusive prey to be stalked and mounted like gazelles. This table is full of men pushing eighty and ninety, but they’re eagerly sharing their latest stories of adventure and peril. Bill took an Amazon trip from Cuzco, Peru, to Manaus, Brazil, through anaconda-infested swamps that are the heart of the South American cocaine trade. Rod was trapped in Fiji during the 2000 coup. “Aw, the problem was in Suva,” he says dismissively. “I was way over in Nadi on the other side of the island.” And still the road calls: Bill wants to see Attu, at the tip of Alaska’s Aleutian islands, the westernmost point of the United States.
^*
Ninety-seven-year-old Alfred Giese, the oldest Traveler present, will be going around the world on the
Queen Mary
next month. There’s a reason why we call the travel bug “wander
lust,
” not “wanderwhim” or “wanderhobby.” It’s an urgent, passionate thing.

These wanderers seek each other out because no one else understands them or wants to see their vacation slides. “We’ve all got this crazy obsession,” says Christopher Hudson, the English-born book publisher for New York’s Museum of Modern Art who is currently serving as TCC president. “I find that when I talk to my other friends
about travel, either their eyes glaze over or they think, ‘Oh God, why’s this guy dropping all these names?’”

The club also provides its members what Chris calls “a good source of information for going to all of these obscure places.” The TCC publishes, at last count, 483 different “info files” on far-flung destinations containing the kind of travel advice you won’t get from Fodor’s. (If you go to the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, get your visa stamp on a separate piece of paper, or you won’t be allowed back into Azerbaijan! Prepare for mud if you’re hiking to Taki Falls, the highest waterfall in the Micronesian nation of Palau!) Every luncheon ends with a travelogue lecture from a recently returned club member—right now, as Chris and I talk at the back of the banquet hall, a slide presentation on Papua New Guinea is beginning; many members are taking notes. I look up just in time to see the phrase “Penis gourds” appear on a PowerPoint bullet list. Then comes the photo—yup, penis gourds are exactly what you think they are. It’s a little hard to keep eye contact with someone when there’s a gigantic penis gourd hovering right behind his head.

As a member of the Travelers’ Century Club executive board, Chris has a vote on which destinations will or won’t make the official TCC list of destinations. This is trickier than it sounds: there are only 192 member states of the United Nations, but the TCC recognizes a whopping 319 different “countries,” including any territory that’s somehow removed from its parent nation. This seems sensible in some cases (surely Paris and Tahiti shouldn’t count as the same “country” to world travelers just because one still administers the other) but leads to absurdity in others (Alaska is a separate country by TCC rules, while Indonesia somehow counts as eight different countries). “Even though we have these slightly strange rules, we take them very seriously,” says Chris and, unbidden, starts patiently explaining to me why the board recently voted to make Abkhazia—but not South Ossetia, another breakaway Georgian region—a TCC “country.” This is evidently not the first time he’s had to go through this with angry club members. I nod sagely as he runs down the
obvious
differences between Abkhazian and South Ossetian infrastructure, a little nervous that there might be a quiz later.

Many people took up country collecting because they heard about the TCC, but the reverse is more often true: these were people who were already obsessive checklist travelers before they knew there was an organization collecting dues for it. Every few years, someone writes in to
The New York Times
’ travel column asking if there’s a club for people who count countries, and the editor dutifully runs the TCC’s mailing address. The same process of accretion built the Highpointers Club, whose three thousand members are dedicated to visiting the highest elevation in every U.S. state. The club was founded by Jack Longacre, an Arkansas trucker who enjoyed visiting state high points and started noticing the same names recorded in all the peak registers, some boasting about their personal counts. “
My God!
” he remembered marveling. “There must be others out there with no more sense than myself!” In 1986, the editors of
Outdoor
magazine let him run a short item looking for like-minded collectors; thirty replied. The following year, nine of them met atop Mount Arvon, Michigan’s highest point, and that became the first of the club’s annual “Konventions.”
^*

I suppose I also started highpointing before I knew there was a club. A few years ago, my wife and I hiked Mount Greylock in northwest Massachusetts to admire the fall foliage in the Berkshires from above. It was an easy hike—at only 3,491 feet, Mount Greylock is less than half the elevation of Flora Mountain, the
hundredth
tallest peak in my home state of Washington—but somehow I felt very rugged and manly knowing I was standing atop the
entire state
of Massachusetts. After discovering online that as many as ten thousand like-minded people share that rush, I track down Craig Noland, official Highpointers “membership guy.” He’s manning the club’s sign-up table at a Smoky Mountain wilderness show in Pigeon Force, Tennessee, when I call him up.

Craig’s been to forty-six of the fifty state high points and come within a thousand feet of two more. “I got blown off Mount Hood [in Oregon] in a snowstorm once,” he tells me in a thick, friendly southern
accent. “I doubt if I’ll get Alaska. I’m older now, and I’m more decrepit, and I’ve got too much steel in my back.”

But most U.S. high points aren’t the forbidding peaks you’re picturing, like Hood or McKinley.
^*
Only five require real mountaineering; the rest are doable even if you’re a rookie like me who thinks a crampon is something you might buy in
that pink aisle
of a drugstore. Some are even less rugged than Mount Greylock: Delaware’s highest point, for example, is in a trailer park. Ohio’s is a vocational school flagpole. The highest point in Florida is Britton Hill—at 345 feet, the lowest high point in any state and considerably lower than many Florida skyscrapers.
^†
It’s a rest stop. “Watch out if you use the restrooms there! There are copperhead snakes,” Craig says helpfully.

It’s a strangely arbitrary pursuit, visiting places with no inherent interest just because the capriciousness of manmade borders has put them on your checklist. George Mallory said he wanted to climb Everest “because it’s there,” but what brings three hundred people a year to a slight rise in an Iowa cornfield? There’s really nothing to see; Mallory might say they’re visiting “because the map says something’s there, but there really isn’t.” The quest is even more puzzling in the cases of collectors like Peter Holden, who has eaten at more than twelve thousand McDonald’s restaurants, or “Winter,”
^‡
who has visited
all but twenty of the 8,500 Starbucks locations in North America. They
never
get to check off a Mount Shasta or a Tahiti from their lists. Their travel goals are dull, ubiquitous, and nearly identical. They are voyagers of the suburban strip mall, pathfinders of the parking lot. But they take their obsession no less seriously. Holden once ate at
forty-five Detroit-area McDonald’s
in a single day (his standard order is two Big Macs, but on marathon days, he’ll settle for a diet soda or a packet of McDonaldland cookies to save for later.)
A documentary
about Winter’s lonely crusade shows him living out of his car and even sucking spilled coffee out of his grimy cup holder at one point, because he’ll check off a Starbucks only once he finishes the drink he buys.

Dr. Alan Hogenauer, a former airline executive and tourism marketing consultant, has coined the name “systematic travel” for this kind of geographic completism and teaches the concept to his travel and tourism students at Loyola Marymount. There’s no question that he practices what he preaches. His website lists no less than 396 different checklists he’s either working on or has completed. He’s most famous for being the first person ever to visit every site in the national park system,
^*
but he’s also visited all eleven parishes of Barbados, all thirty “Historic Houses of Worship” in the city of Philadelphia, all fifty-one weather stations in Thailand, and every U.S. presidential birthplace. At this point he’s resorted to inventing new things he can count, as I learn when I track him down days after a weekend jaunt to Casablanca. “That gave me Africa in January,” he explains proudly. “Now I have all seventy-two ‘continent-months’: visiting some point in every continent in every calendar month.”