Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (3 page)

The Çatalhöyük mural. Volcanoes or leopard? You make the call.

Many early protomaps do share some similarities with modern cartography, but it’s a blurry line: their primary significance was probably artistic or spiritual. The essential traits we associate with maps today
evolved gradually over millennia
. We first see cardinal directions on Babylonian clay tablet maps from five thousand years ago, for instance, but distances don’t appear on maps for three thousand more years—our oldest such example is a bronze plate from China’s Zhou Dynasty. Centuries more pass before we get to our oldest surviving paper map, a Greek papyrus depicting the Iberian Peninsula around the time of Christ. The first compass rose appears in the Catalan Atlas of 1375. “Chloropleth” maps—those in which areas are colored differently to represent different values on some scale, like the red-and-blue maps on election night—date back only to 1826.
^*

But if the historical “discovery” of maps was a slow and gradual process, the way modern mapheads discover maps as children is more like the way cavemen must have discovered fire: as a flash of lightning. You see that first map, and your mind is rewired, probably forever. In my case, the Ur-map was a wooden puzzle of the fifty states I got as a Christmas present when I was three—you know the kind, Florida decorated with palm trees, Washington with apples. On my puzzle, Nebraska, confusingly, wore a picture of a family of pigs. The two peninsulas of Michigan were welded together into a single puzzle piece, so that I believed for years afterward that Michigan was a single land-mass in the lumpy shape of a lady’s handbag.

For other kids, it was the globe in Dad’s study, or the atlas stretched out on the shag carpeting of the living room, or a free gas station map during a family vacation to Yosemite. (Many cases of twentieth-century American map geekdom, it seems, began the same way that many twentieth-century
Americans
began: conceived in the backseats of Buicks.) But whatever the map, all it takes is one. Cartophilia, the love of maps, is a love at first sight. It must be predestined, written somewhere in the chromosomes.

It’s been this way for centuries. That wooden map puzzle that took my map virginity when I was three? Those date back to the 1760s, when they were called “dissected maps” and were wildly popular toys, the
ancestors of all modern jigsaw puzzles
. For Victorian children, the most common first map was a page in a family or school Bible, since a map of the Holy Land was often the only color plate in a vast sea of “begat“s and “behold“s. Nothing like a dry two-hour sermon on the Book of Lamentations to make a simple relief map look suddenly fascinating by comparison! That single page probably drew more youthful study than the rest of the Good Book put together—Samuel Beckett makes a joke in
Waiting for Godot
about how his two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, have never read the Gospels but remember very clearly that the Dead Sea in their Bible maps was a “
very pretty . . . pale blue
.” Joseph Hooker, the great British botanist, once wrote to his close friend Charles Darwin that his first exposure to maps had been a Sunday school “
map of the world
before the flood” that he said he spent hours of his “tenderest years” studying. That one map led to his lifelong interest in exploration
and science, during which he helped Darwin develop the theory of evolution.

In the twentieth century, when kids were spending less time in front of Bibles, the inevitable map on their schoolroom wall served the same purpose: something to stare at when a dull monologue on fractions or
Johnny Tremain
started to turn into the wordless “wah-wah” drone of the teacher from a
Peanuts
TV special. I just now realized
why
I know all the Australian state capitals, in fact: my desk in second grade was right next to the bulletin board that had the world map on it. My head was just inches from Darwin and Adelaide and, um, Hobart. (See? I still got it.) If I’d been a little taller then, I might be an expert on Indonesia or Japan today instead.

Recently I was driving my friend Todd to the airport, and, while talking about his vacation plans, he outed himself as a bit of a geography nerd. (I’d known Todd for years, incidentally, but was only now finding out we had this in common. Map people sometimes live for years in the closet, cartophilia apparently being one of the last remaining loves that dare not speak their names.) He boasted that, thanks to the hours of his childhood he’d spent poring over atlases, he could still rattle off the names of every world capital, so that’s how we spent the rest of the drive. We both discovered that the capitals we stumbled over weren’t the obscure ones (Bujumbura, Burundi! Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago!) but rather major European cities like Bratislava, Slovakia, and Kiev, Ukraine. Why? Because these cities had committed the crime of becoming national capitals
after
the end of the Cold War, when Todd and I weren’t map-memorizing nine-year-olds anymore! Apparently our knowledge of geography is like your grandparents’ knowledge of personal computers: it ends in 1987.

I suspect that Todd and I are far from alone in this—that many people’s hunger for maps (mappetite?) peaks in childhood. In part, this is due to the fact that nobody is ever as obsessed about
anything
as a crazed seven-year-old is; this week I’m sure my son, Dylan, thinks about dinosaurs more than any adult paleontologist ever. Next week it’ll probably be spaceships or Venus flytraps or sports cars.

But there does seem to be something about maps that makes them specifically irresistible to children. Consider: most square, old-timey hobbies are taken up in middle age as a way to mortify one’s teenage children. That’s when Dad suddenly gets obsessed with Dixieland jazz or bird-watching or brewing lager in the basement. Not so with map love, which you catch either during your Kool-Aid years or not at all. In fact, I remember my map ardor abruptly cooling around puberty—you discover pretty quickly that it’s not a hit with girls to know the names of all the Netherlands Antilles. In college, I briefly had a pleasant-but-bookish Canadian roommate named Sheldon. (Note: Nerdy first name not fictionalized for this story!) Sheldon moved into the apartment first that September and had the whole place—living room, kitchen, bedrooms—papered with dozens of
National Geographic
maps by the time the rest of us arrived. I rolled my eyes and resigned myself to the fact that we were never going to see a single girl inside the apartment. But in third grade, I’m sure I would have been over the moon at this development, making Sheldon pinky-swear to be my BFF and drawing detailed maps of Costa Rica on the back of his Trapper Keeper.

See, in elementary school, I was convinced that I was the only one in the world who felt like this. None of my friends, I was sure, ran home to their atlases after school. In the years since then, I’ve become vaguely aware that this, whatever it is, is a thing that exists: that some fraction of humanity loves geography with a strange intensity. I’ll see a three-year-old on
Oprah
who can point out every country on a world map and think, hey, that was me. I’ll read about a member of the Extra Miler Club who has visited all 3,141 counties in the United States or about an antique map of the Battle of Yorktown selling at auction for a million dollars. And I’ll wonder: where does this come from? It’s easy to see from my own life story, my
Portrait of the Autist as a Young Man,
that these mapheads are my tribe, but I’m mystified by our shared tribal culture and religion. Why did maps mean—why
do
they still mean, I guess—so much to me? Maps are just a way of organizing information, after all—not normally the kind of thing that spawns obsessive fandom. I’ve never heard anyone profess any particular love for the Dewey Decimal System. I’ve never met a pie-chart geek. I suppose indexes are good at what they do, but do they inspire devotion?

There must be something innate about maps, about this one specific way of picturing our world and our relation to it, that charms us, calls to us, won’t let us look anywhere else in the room if there’s a map on the wall. I want to get to the bottom of what that is. I see it as a chance to explore one of the last remaining “blank spaces” available to us amateur geographers and cartographers: the mystery of what makes our consuming map obsession tick. I will go there.

Chapter 2
BEARING

n
.:
the situation or horizontal direction of one
point with respect to the compass

An individual is not
distinct from his place. He is his place.

—GABRIEL MARCEL

J
ames Joyce’s alter ego,
Stephen Dedalus
, is bored in his geography classes—all those place-names in America seem so far away to him. But when the places are
his,
his native surroundings, he has no trouble with their names. This is what he writes on the flyleaf of his geography textbook:

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

As a child, I liked to write my address using a similar hierarchy—though I was apparently more of a space geek than wee Stephen, so my address featured a few steps (“The Solar System, Orion Arm,
Milky Way Galaxy, Virgo Supercluster”) that he skipped. I’m sure my elaborate envelope-addressing system annoyed the mailman, but it delighted me. One of the fundamental questions of childhood is “Where am I?” and children want to know the answer on every level, from the microlocal to the galactic.

“What was it that identified us as closet geographers, perhaps as children, long before we knew enough to put a name on our private passions?” Peirce Lewis, then the president of the Association of American Geographers,
asked in a 1985 address
. The “visceral love of maps” is only part of the equation, he said. “The second, common to us all, is topophilia, an equally visceral passion for the earth—more particularly, some magic or beloved place on the surface of the earth.”

The word “topophilia,” from the Greek for “love of place,” was popularized by the
geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
in a 1974 book.
^*
When I first read about the concept, I experienced a jolt of recognition and validation, like a patient finally getting the right diagnosis for an obscure malady. I had felt this weirdly intense connection to landscape my whole life, but it was a relief to finally have a fancy Greek name to hang on it. Lewis said he had been forged into a geographer by the white sand dunes on the shores of Lake Michigan where he used to spend his summers as a child. My own primeval landscape was the Pacific Northwest, where I was raised: the lush pastures of my grandparents’ farm in Oregon’s Willamette River Valley, and especially the drizzly cedar-and-fir forests of western Washington State, so thick with moss and ferns that even in winter the forest floor is a vivid shade of green you normally see only in children’s books about dinosaurs. If you hooked me up to one of those hospital monitors, I imagine the graph of my heartbeat would look exactly like the pale contour of the Olympic Mountains seen across Puget Sound on a sunny day. Well, no, not really. That would be charming but probably fatal.

Young topophiles are most deeply shaped by the environments
where they first became aware they
had
an environment: they imprint, like barnyard fowl. Baby ducks will follow the first moving object they see in the first few hours after they hatch. If it’s their mother, great; if it’s not, they become the ducklings you see following pigs or tractors around the farm on hilarious Sunday-morning news pieces. When I was seven years old, my family moved from Seattle to Seoul, Korea; I’ve since lived all over the globe, from Singapore to Spain to Salt Lake City. (The alliteration has been a coincidence, not an itinerary.) These are all places with distinctive, beautiful landscapes, ranging from tropical jungles to Mars-like salt flats, and I happily explored them all, but it was too late for me. I had already imprinted on a different part of the world. Falling in love with places is just like falling in love with people: it can happen more than once, but never quite like your first time.

These early landscapes are the maps over which my mind wanders even while I’m asleep. I rarely dream about the office cubicle where I worked for years or the house I live in now. My dreams are far more likely to be set in more primal settings: my grandparents’ sunlit kitchen, the hallways of my elementary school. And geography is an unusually vivid element in my dreams. Upon waking, I rarely remember the dream people I met or the jumble of events that took place, but I always have a very strong sense for where I stood, which direction I was traveling. Years later, I can still remember dreams that took place in nonexistent neighborhoods of major cities—Seattle, San Francisco, New York. Within those dreams, I always navigated with a very specific idea of where I was on a city map, and always, of course, with the dreamer’s absolute certainty that I had been there many times before.