Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (26 page)

And highpointers know that their collection isn’t about the climb so much as it is getting off the beaten path. “It’s a vehicle that takes you places you never would have thought about going to,” Craig Noland says. “Have you ever been to Kenton, Oklahoma?” Oddly enough, I haven’t. He explains that it’s the panhandle town nearest to Black Mesa, the Sooner State’s highest point. “You can go there and see dinosaur tracks and the country’s longest mesa. There’s a three-state border that’s changed places five different times. You can see the wagon ruts from the old Santa Fe Trail. It’s the only town in Oklahoma that’s in the Mountain Time Zone. You can spend the whole day there, in the middle of nowhere! But you’d never say, ‘Hey, let’s go to Kenton and check it out.’ “

I don’t really have a list of my own, though I admire those who do. I respect finishers, people who won’t settle for doing
most
of something.
I like knowing that tens of thousands of compulsive travelers are crisscrossing the globe right now, elevating the most mundane of human endeavors—getting from one place to another—into a kind of performance art.

As recently as a century ago, people who wanted to see the entire world knew that could never happen, so they would sit with atlases and idly daydream of the places they saw mapped there. In our age of casual travel, it surprises us to remember that no sitting U.S. president
ever
left the country until 1906, when Teddy Roosevelt wanted to find out how the Panama Canal was coming along. For the first time in history, jet-age transportation has put essentially the entire Earth within the reach of these insatiable travelers. They can now dispense with the atlas, having visited every single one of its pages. They’ve
become
the atlas.

And in at least one case, they’ve literally become the territory as well. In 2002, Jack Longacre, the founder of the Highpointers Club, learned that he had terminal cancer. “
I want to be
on the mountains,” he told friends as he prepared his will. “That’s where I belong.” So he collected film canisters, labeled them with the names of the fifty states, and distributed them to club members. When he died nine months later, they honored his last wish by scattering his ashes on the United States Geographic Survey markers atop all fifty high points, the peaks and the trailer parks, the mesas and the rest stops, every single one. One final checklist.

Chapter 9
TRANSIT

n.
: a piece of surveying equipment used by mapmakers:
a theodolite with a reversible telescope

There are map people
whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled.

—JOHN STEINBECK

I
t’s a spectacularly beautiful day for a drive in the Pacific Northwest. Mount Rainier looms above the blue waters of Commencement Bay so big and clear that it looks like a special effect. Behind it tower summer banks of golden cumulus clouds straight out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. But the two men I’m driving with seem oblivious to nature’s wonders. They’re interested in a different kind of scenery.

“That bridge we just crossed was built in 1928. It was widened ten years ago, but the plaque there is still stamped with the original date,” says Mark Bozanich, who is behind the wheel. He’s a slow, thoughtful talker with a slightly scraggly white beard, the prerogative of the wise old geek in virtually any field. “And that bridge we’re going under now still has the old Milwaukee Railroad logo, did you see that?”

John Spafford, in the passenger seat, is a somewhat younger guy with frosted blond hair, still clipped as short as it must have been during his eight-year career in army intelligence. He’s been explaining
the snarled traffic caused by a state route that essentially dead-ends to our southeast. “There’s a missing link between Tacoma and the 167, the Valley Freeway. It comes down into Puyallup, and now you’re connecting with the 512 that’ll take you south to I-5, but there are plans to expand it all the way up to the port!” Visions of a six-lane limited-access bypass from Tacoma all the way north to the Seattle suburbs dance in John’s eyes.

Mark and John are self-confessed “roadgeeks,” as these amateur highway scholars prefer to call themselves.
^*
Just as Britain’s oft-ridiculed “trainspotters” have made a science of ticking off locomotive numbers in little notebooks, so have roadgeeks appointed themselves the guardians of America’s road network, from its mighty interstates to its tiniest country lanes. They can tell the difference between a Westinghouse streetlight and a GE one and are the only ones who notice when the lettering on interstate signage is switched over from Highway Gothic to the new Clearview font. (Hint: Look for the curved tail on the lowercase “l”!) They follow road construction projects with a regularity and fervor that others might reserve for a favorite soap opera or sports team. They know why there’s one I-76 in southern Pennsylvania and another one in northeastern Colorado,
^†
and how to interpret West Virginia’s odd, fractionally numbered county routes.
^‡

Scratch a roadgeek, and you’ll find a maphead; virtually all their stories begin with a road atlas, scrutinized for long hours during one of the endless driving vacations of childhood. Mark grew up carefully tallying the traffic signals on Highway 99 between Seattle and his grandparents’ house in Portland every summer and still has a voluminous collection of old gas station maps. John inherited his family’s navigator position at the tender age of nine, when a road atlas got thrown at him in the backseat after Mom misread the map once too
often. For years, a buff like Mark or John would study the highways with the sad conviction that he was the only person in the world so fascinated with cloverleafs and control cities.
^*
The phenomenon didn’t get a name until the dawn of the Internet, when these lonely “roads scholars” were surprised to discover thousands of like-minded enthusiasts all over the world. “Great,” Mark’s daughter likes to tell him. “All fifty people that are interested in highways can now find each other.”

Even better, the Internet gave roadgeeks a place to “publish” their work. Photography is a huge part of roadgeek travel; when test-driving a new car, the dedicated buff will always check to see how a camera would fit up front, the better to take dashboard photos of every mileage sign and junction of their future expeditions. Buffs might feel a little silly keeping thousands of these snapshots in shoe boxes under their bed, but on the Web, they can be shared with the public: a permanent record of their journeys, even if no one ever looks at it. Every roadgeek website includes pages of these nearly identical photos, an endless stream of green rectangles and “Exit Only” arrows and the taillights of semitrucks. These aren’t rare findings, like a bird-watcher’s photos; after all, millions of motorists see the exact same views every year. But central to the roadgeek urge is the certainty that these journeys must be documented—collected, even. Roadgeeks often boast of how many routes they’ve “clinched”—that is, driven every single mile of.
^†
It’s a very specific—and attainable—form of systematic travel.

And maybe the very banality of these driver’s-eye slide shows is their real value. Though the rest of us may take it for granted, the U.S. Interstate Highway System is one of the most remarkable engineering feats ever conceived. Its origins date back to 1919, when a young army officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower, missing his family in California, agreed to join
a cross-country convoy
of military vehicles heading for the West Coast. Part of the company’s mission was to find out
if these trucks and staff cars—which had just won a grueling trench war in Europe, mind you—were even
capable
of surviving the trip. In 1919, driving from sea to shining sea wasn’t the leisurely five-day tour we know today. Paved roads largely disappeared outside major American cities, so the convoy had to contend with mud, dust, ruts, unstable bridges, and even quicksand. Their “successful” entry into San Francisco came sixty-two days after starting out (an average speed of six miles per hour!), and the convoy lost nine vehicles and twenty-one men
^*
in the 230 accidents they suffered along the way. Eisenhower never forgot the ordeal, especially when compared to the expansive and well-maintained autobahn network he saw in Germany during the Second World War. In 1956, as president, he signed the Interstate Highway System into law, authorizing 41,000 miles of super-highways with a combined land area
the size of the state of Delaware
and using enough cement to build eighty Hoover Dams. It was the greatest peacetime public works project in history.

And yet, unlike the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, tourists don’t line up every day of the year to ooh and aah over the interstate system. In fact, we literally grind it underfoot in our haste to arrive at, and photograph, far less impressive bits of roadside construction (the Corn Palace; the world’s largest rocking chair; Branson, Missouri). Roads are like maps in that we think about them only when they
don’t
do their job and we wind up lost or stuck or sidelined. If not for roadgeeks, who would appreciate the lowly highway? Mark pauses for a moment in our route to point out the road construction connecting Sprague Avenue to state highway 16; a new westbound viaduct is being built because the unique design of the existing one—four-legged piers, each leg weighing almost four hundred tons—means that it can’t be widened. It’s true: the tapered legs of the old viaduct are quite distinctive, even beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever really
looked
at the supports of any elevated highway, though I’m sure I’ve driven on thousands.

Maybe roadgeeks can find something to fascinate them on just about any highway in America, but they also have their own special
landmarks and pilgrimages. Some of these oddities are so bizarre they’d be spotted even by amateurs like me. There’s
the traffic light in Syracuse’s
Tipperary Hill where the green signal is on the
top
(a nod to the neighborhood’s Irish roots). Or 1010th Street west of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, believed to be
the nation’s highest-numbered road
. Or the strange vortex that is
US-321 through Elizabethton
, Tennessee—it enters town signed as south–north but reverses the signage when it hits US-19E: now the two directions are north–south, respectively. No matter which way you leave town on US-321, you’re headed south!

Breezewood, Pennsylvania, an unincorporated hamlet of only two hundred people, is perhaps the most notorious destination. “Most people would say, ‘What’s in Breezewood?’” Mark tells me. “But mention it to a roadgeek, and they’ll shudder.” When I-70 was built through the area, funding disagreements with the Pennsylvania Turn-pike Commission meant that no ramps could be built connecting the new freeway to the turnpike. As a result, there’s still a gap of less than a mile in the freeway there, and drivers on I-70 are puzzled to see traffic signals suddenly appear
on the interstate
. Local gas stations and fast-food franchises love the anomaly, of course, and have opposed any attempts to build a real interchange. Roadgeeks now use the term “breezewood” to refer to any place where stoplights unexpectedly interrupt highway traffic, and some darkly blame former Pennsylvania congressman Bud Shuster for the original imbroglio. Shuster is still well remembered even in the real world for spearheading an array of pork-barrel transportation projects in his district, but in the road-geek world, he’s a scheming supervillain of Fu Manchu proportions. In 1991, Shuster insisted that a new highway through Altoona be signed as Interstate 99—in violation of national guidelines—despite the fact that it lies between I-79 and I-81.
The numbering was out of order
! To roadgeeks, with their sometimes Asperger-like insistence on order and constancy, this was an unforgivable sin.

But the road buff’s eye for detail often performs a public service as well. We all rely on the design of the nation’s highway system every day, whether we’re commuting to work or buying a head of lettuce
shipped to us straight from California on I-80, but how many of us actually follow proposed improvement projects or monitor new road signs to make sure they’re right? Roadgeeks are the only ones writing huffy e-mails to their state transportation departments when they notice confusing signs or misnumbered shields, and time and again, from Kanab, Utah, to Pensacola, Florida, they’ve been pleased to see the errors they reported fixed the next time they’ve driven by. We may not know it, but we are all in their debt.