Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (36 page)

I don’t think that AR wayfinding will
replace
maps, because I can’t use it for many things that I rely on maps for. It’s good for telling me what’s around me right now but not so good at showing me which counties of Florida voted for Barack Obama in 2008 or whether Peru is north or south of Ecuador. I do worry that augmented reality could continue the current trend of GPS-based mapping tools that are so convenient, so easy to use, that they stunt our built-in spatial senses. They are, in effect, maps so good that they make us bad at mapping.

GPS navigation is usually the whipping boy in this argument. Every driver who heads off a cliff or onto railroad tracks just because the GPS voice told him to—and there are thousands of these stories—is a symptom of a culture that is increasingly outsourcing its spatial thinking to technology, and once those jobs are gone, they may not come back. My favorite news story of GPS-crutch incompetence is that of
an unnamed Swedish couple
trying to drive from Venice to the sunny isle of Capri in 2009. Unfortunately, they accidentally misspelled
the name of their destination when they entered it into their GPS, and arrived a few hours later at the industrial northern town of
Carpi,
where they wandered into the town hall and asked confused officials how to get to the Blue Grotto, Capri’s famous sea cave. (The officials there assumed that “the Blue Grotto” must be some local restaurant they’d never heard of.) Ten seconds with a map, of course, would have told these tourists that

• you can’t make the four-hundred-mile drive from Venice to Capri in just two hours;

• Capri is southeast of Venice, not west;

• and, crucially, that
it’s a small island,
and the couple hadn’t crossed a bridge or used a boat to get to Carpi, which is located on a landlocked inland plain!

But they didn’t look at a map. They trusted GPS.

The decline of our wayfinding abilities didn’t begin with GPS, of course. Nomadic cultures like the Bedouins still use all kinds of natural wayfinding cues in the stars and camel tracks that a modern American would never see because we’ve been able to rely on roads and signs and so forth in our cozy urban lives. Many human skills ceded to technology are no great loss—I’m not as good as my ancestors were at telling time based on the position of the sun in the sky, but that’s okay because my wristwatch works just fine. But the end of navigation might be more serious. Reckoning with our environment isn’t a single skill; it’s a whole web of spatial senses and abilities, many so fundamental that we can’t afford to lose them to machines. We know that thinking hard about navigation is what grows those neurons in our brains—what happens if we quit exercising those cells and they get flabby? “
Society is geared
toward shrinking the hippocampus,” says Véronique Bohbot, a Montreal professor of psychiatry who specializes in spatial memory. “In the next twenty years, I think we’re going to see dementia occurring earlier and earlier.”

As a species, the loss of our spatial abilities might be a tragedy, but to a map nerd, an even sadder casualty of the digital map revolution might be paper maps themselves. As I wander into downtown
Seattle’s biggest map store, I notice immediately that its new location, near the tourist-packed Pike Place Market, displays fewer travel maps than the previous store did. The cabinet of USGS topographical maps on the back wall is usually left alone; hikers get the trail maps they need on their cell phones. “The map business has slowed down a lot,” the store’s co-owner tells me. She gestures vaguely to a rack of folded pocket maps. “When a new map like that came out, we used to have to order twenty, twenty-five of them, or we’d sell out. Now we’re lucky to sell one or two. We hope we can stay alive by diversifying.” Indeed, this nominal “map store” now fills most of its space with travel items (backpacks and guidebooks) and vaguely geographical gifts (national flags, dodecahedral Earth globes, and novelty wall maps that use some design gimmick—$3,500 in rare hardwoods, for example, or cleverly placed notes on a series of musical staffs—to delineate the continents).

Allen Carroll, the chief cartographer at National Geographic, tells me that he’s not worried about the market, because printed maps and Internet maps fulfill different functions. “So far, we haven’t found that our atlas sales have been hurt by the Internet. Very different than is the case, obviously, with encyclopedias.” Encyclopedia publishers like Britannica were caught unawares by the rise of CD-ROM encyclopedias in the 1990s, and their
sales collapsed by 83 percent
in just five years. Atlases may hold out longer, because no digital platform has yet managed to deliver browsable maps, in all their detail and versatility, as well as paper can. But what happens when that platform arrives, as it inevitably will? Could one killer iPad app doom atlases forever?

I may be part of the last generation to harbor a peculiar nostalgia for paper maps that stubbornly refuse to zoom or scroll or layer—in fact, that stubbornly refuse even to refold themselves into the neat rectangle you found in the glove compartment. That’s what it is: nostalgia. Paper maps remind me of school libraries and the backseat of the family car on vacation. Pleasant times.

The name on nearly all those maps was “Rand McNally,” America’s best-known and best-selling map publisher for most of the last century. Founded in Chicago in 1868, the partnership between a Boston printer and a poor Irish immigrant soon branched out into the budding transportation industry, producing railroad tickets, guides,
and timetables. The company was very nearly destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871, but quick-thinking cofounder
William Rand saved the day
, rescuing two ticket-printing machines from the flames and burying them in the cool sand at a Lake Michigan beach three miles north of the city, where they’d be safe from the 3,000-degree inferno. Just three days later, before a survey had even been completed of the still-smoldering city, the buried machines were up and running in a rented building that had survived the flames. The very next year, Rand McNally printed its first map, a railway map of the United States and Canada, and the rest is history.

When I asked a Rand McNally publicist if I could stop by for a visit, I hoped its headquarters would retain some of the musty mid-century charm I associate with its maps—would cavernous brick vaults full of whirring printing presses be too much to ask? Instead my cab pulls up to an anonymous office park in suburban Skokie. I don’t even see the iconic Rand McNally logo—a compass superimposed on an elliptical globe—until I’m in the lobby trying to figure out which floor reception is on.

“We finally moved out of the old place four months ago,” explains Jane Szczepaniak, the assistant who arranged my visit. The company’s two hundred employees don’t seem to miss the windowless painted cinder-block walls and faded green filing cabinets of their longtime home. “It felt like an elementary school,” Jane jokes. In the move, fifty years of old map film were tossed, and employees were invited to pillage a disorganized, dimly lit room full of thousands of past Rand McNally maps. Once everyone had a few souvenirs, the rest were thrown away.

Joel Minster, a former civil engineer, has been chief cartographer at Rand McNally for the past nine years. His office looks decidedly modern, with blue Earth hemispheres protruding from the walls as if they’d been beamed there by a
Star Trek
transporter, but he’s adamant that old-fashioned paper maps are still Rand McNally’s focus—for the moment. When I ask about the maps on the Rand McNally website, which still scroll and
zoom chunkily in fixed increments
, like MapQuest in 1999, he smiles wryly. “We’re giving those away for free, so it’s not really our goal to be number one.” But even though
road atlases sold to truckers and vacationers still pay the bills, he says that the company will keep a presence in GPS devices and e-reader atlases and smart-phone apps—not necessarily because it thinks those are the future but to have a toe in the water just in case. In fifteen or twenty years, he vows, “Rand McNally will still be in the business of travel planning. I have no idea what media we’ll be using to deliver that information—a chip in your brain, sure—but we’ll be there.”

Despite my long history with paper maps, I wind up convinced by Minster’s optimism: there will be nothing to lament when some new platform eventually replaces them, since that new technology, whatever it is, will by definition have to do all the things that paper maps do well. It will have to be portable and immediately intuitive. It will have to accommodate readers who need a specific piece of information
now,
as well as those just browsing for pleasure. And it will have to be a broader canvas than just a set of driving directions—not just how to get from A to B but a whole alphabet through Z of nearby suggestions and digressions. Maybe a few old-timers like me will always be annoying our grandkids with tales of how awesome maps used to be when they smelled like ink and crinkled like wood pulp, but, more likely than not, these will be stories of the walking-uphill-in-the-snow-to-school variety. “You kids today don’t know how good you have it with your holographic globes that rotate by scanning your retinas! I had to do my homework with maps on paper—no, really, paper!—and they were unwieldy and hard to find stuff on and they were obsolete the moment they were printed. I’m telling you, it took
character
to be a map nerd back then!”

And—who knows?—maybe paper maps will be sticking around longer than we think. I rode in a cab twice during my visit to Chicago: once from the airport out to Rand McNally headquarters in Skokie and then from Skokie to my hotel. Both cabdrivers were enslaved to a dashboard GPS that told them exactly where to turn at every moment. Yet somehow we still managed to get lost along the way. Both times.

Chapter 12
RELIEF

n.
: differences in elevation on the Earth’s surface,
as represented on a map by contours or shading

We shall not cease
from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

—T. S. ELIOT

M
y cell phone rings as I’m sitting with some friends, waiting for a concert to start. “Ken, this is Rodger. You left a message for me last week?”

“Right! Rodger! Thanks for calling me back. Your neighbor Kathy gave me your number. I hope that’s okay.” I take a deep breath, because what I’m about to say next is deeply weird. “Did you know that there’s an integer degree confluence at the end of your driveway?”

A long pause. “There’s a
what
in my driveway?”

The Degree Confluence Project was started in 1996 by a Massachusetts Web programmer named Alex Jarrett, a new GPS owner who noticed that his commute happened to take him across the nearby seventy-second meridian twice a day. The mathematical perfection of that line of longitude—seventy-two degrees west, no minutes, no seconds—sang to him like a row of zeroes on a rolling-over odometer. He and a friend biked ten miles to get to the point where the seventy-second meridian crossed their closest parallel, forty-three
degrees north. The intersection turned out to be a nondescript spot of snowy woods next to a swamp. “
We kept expecting
there to be a monument at any location saying ‘43N/72W’ but no such luck,” Alex wrote on his website, where he posted pictures of the momentous expedition.

If you think about it, that very lack of a monument was what turned “confluence hunting” into a popular pastime, first for Jarrett and his friends and family and then for thousands of geography geeks who stumbled across his project on the Internet. There’s no National Geodetic Survey benchmark in the ground to identify these integer confluences, and that means
nobody’s ever found them before
. There are
16,340
“confluence points” worldwide,
^*
and each one represents a chance to plant a flag like the explorers of old.
Confluence hunters have dutifully braved
army ants in the jungles of Ghana, leeches in Malaysian swamps, and armed nomads in the Algerian Sahara in pursuit of their quixotic goal, but there are still more than ten thousand primary confluences yet to be visited worldwide.

But not every confluence hunt need turn into an Indiana Jones adventure; in fact, no spot on Earth is more than forty-nine miles from one of these points of cartographic perfection. I was thrilled to find that Seattle’s nearest confluence was less than a half hour from my front door—but my attempt to visit 48 degrees north, 122 degrees east came up short. There were no army ants or border guards, but there were no fewer than four
NO TRESPASSING
signs posted just a few tantalizing yards from my quarry. I found a few visits to the spot recorded on the confluence project’s website, but most of the hunters had just bushwhacked halfway to the spot from a back road, and none had logged the spot in accordance with strict Degree Confluence Project guidelines—that is, with the permission of the landowner.