Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (38 page)

But no matter what we do, I think maps are destined to win the battle. For five hundred years, maps changed barely at all, so it’s no surprise that our enthusiasm for them has faded a bit. But today we are poised at the brink of a potentially Gutenberg-like sea change for maps. There’s nothing dull about a flight through a three-dimensional Grand Canyon on Google Earth, or a map that shows where all your friends are in real time, or a comprehensive world atlas—down to street-level detail!—that you can carry with you on a cell phone. These technologies are so compelling that they could convert even the most spatially confused map skeptic, the way video games turned thousands of not-otherwise-destined-for-geekdom
kids into computer science majors. For the first time in decades, there is reason to think that we might be entering a geographic renaissance.
Viva la revolución.

If the geographers and psychologists I’ve talked to are right and map love is just a symptom of a gift for spatial thinking, it makes sense that maps could be passed through families genetically, like curly hair or color blindness. That’s certainly true in my case; my parents liked looking at maps. So did my grandparents, my mom’s parents. The second atlas I ever owned as a kid, after the Hammond atlas I saved up all year for, was a Rand McNally
Cosmopolitan World Atlas
that my grandma mailed to me in Korea. I can still picture the ballpoint-pen inscription on the title page, in her neat, round handwriting: “Merry Christmas 1983! Atlases are some of our favorite things too! Love, Grandma and Grandpa.” That meant a lot to me at that age, the idea that someone besides me
understood
—that atlases were, in fact, an acceptable thing for adults to say they liked.

Grandma died of a lung ailment almost ten years ago, shortly after Mindy and I were married. She never got to meet her great-grandkids, and, I realize now, I never got to talk maps with her as a grown-up. My grandpa is still doing as well as one could hope to at eighty-two, and since he lives nearby, we have him over for dinner every Wednesday night. It’s not hard to get him to talk about his late wife, whom he clearly still misses very much.

“Why did Grandma always love maps and atlases?” I ask him one night as we clear the table after dinner.

“Well, her mother married a man called Elcock.” (From many past conversations with my grandpa, I’m not surprised that this story seems to (a) begin decades before I thought it did and (b) involve people I’ve never met.) “He was a bounder. A drunk. Betty remembers getting sent out to the bars to try to get him to come home.” He still refers to his wife in the present tense; he also sometimes slips and calls her “your mother,” a habit he must have fallen into while raising his three daughters.

“Betty’s mother divorced this man Elcock, then remarried him, then divorced him. After the divorce, her mother had to start working full-time. They moved a lot. One time when we were in Salt Lake City, we drove around all afternoon looking at all the places where she’d lived. I remember four, five, six of them. During the summer, she and Teddy”—that’s Grandma’s younger sister, my great-aunt—“were sent to live with relatives because her mother was working such long hours. They’d sit in the public library all day, and your mother would look at atlases.” That was where it all started, then: a turbulent home life and a welcoming library with pages and pages of beautiful maps. Werner Muensterberger, who wrote about antique maps in his book
Collecting: An Unruly Passion,
has noticed that map lovers often seem to come from broken homes (like Grandma’s) or families that moved around a lot (like mine). Maps give us a sense of place and stability and origin that we otherwise lack.

“She was smart as a whip,” he says ruefully. “That was her great disappointment, never finishing school.”

“Did she still like to look at maps when you were married?”

“Well, she believed in history. In the 1960s she started attending genealogy seminars, and you couldn’t do genealogy without telling the history of a town or an area. Hanging over my bed—her bed—is a
National Geographic
map of New England. She traced her family all the way back to colonial days and then back to England. I still have the map. I haven’t moved a lot of her stuff.” He pauses to think. “Maybe I should, but I haven’t done it.”

I like the notion that I come from a long heritage of maps, that I belong in a long line of keepers of the flame, like a cartographic version of the Knights Templar. I know from my grandma’s years of genealogy work that her family was descended from the Mormon pioneers who settled Utah beginning in 1847. This means, I suppose, that I wouldn’t even
exist
without those great nineteenth-century maps of the West that I glimpsed in the Library of Congress. Without the maps of one Charles Preuss, the German-born cartographer for John C. Frémont’s expeditions, Brigham Young would never have made it to the Great Salt Lake.

But I’ve been worried of late that I might not have passed along my map genes in robust enough fashion. My own kids, despite adopting a new all-consuming obsession every week or so, have never seemed too interested in maps. We bought them a wall-sized cloth U.S. map from FAO Schwarz a few Christmases ago and hung it in the playroom, but I’ve never seen them spend much time with it. At the moment, all the little Velcro pieces (landmarks and crops and whatnot) are randomly stuck onto the waters of the Gulf of Mexico—the only part of the map that my three-year-old can reach. They both love the GPS navigator in our car, but “Daniel” gives driving directions so well that you never
have
to look at a map—he’s the antimap, in many ways. Obviously my love for my children doesn’t depend on whether or not they know that Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the highest-altitude state capital or that Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan, has no traffic lights. But I remember how important maps were to me at their age, and I’d like to be able to share that joy again with them, now that I’m a cranky old geonerd instead of a starry-eyed young one.

I poke my head into Dylan’s room one night to tuck him into bed. “Nine o’clock, guy. Lights out.”

“Are you almost done with your map book?” he asks sleepily.

He asks this a lot, but out of pure self-interest, not cartophilia. “The map book” is always the reason I give when I can’t play with him every waking hour. You want me to wear a ninja mask while you shoot suction-cup-tipped Nerf bullets at my forehead? Sorry, map book.

“Actually, I’m almost done,” I say. “Today I was trying to figure out which parts of the book should actually have maps to illustrate them.”

“You can put my map in your book if you want. I drew it today.”

“Really? You drew a map? Let me see.”

The map—the first map—is sitting in a pile of books at the head of his bed, just where I used to keep my
Medallion World Atlas
. “This is the Sea of Sharks,” he says. “You have to follow this dotted line through the sharks and the octopuses and jellyfish to get to the X-marks-the-spot.”

“What’s at the X?”

This is apparently the silliest question anyone has ever asked.
“That’s the treasure!” He yawns. “Tomorrow I’m going to make a map of my submarine. Will you put it in your book?”

“We’ll see. Good night, kiddo.”

“Good night, Dad.”

Maybe the map gene lives after all. I walk downstairs smiling, and Dylan, I can only assume, drifts off to explore the Sea of Sharks.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1: ECCENTRICITY

1
“My wound is geography”:
Pat Conroy,
The Prince of Tides
(New York: Dial, 1986),
p. 1
.

2
“Weirton, West Virginia”:
Located at the narrowest part of West Virginia’s pointy little panhandle part, Weirton extends from the Ohio border in the west all the way to Pennsylvania on the east—even though the town is only five miles wide.

3
“Now when I was a little chap”:
Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
(New York: Norton, 1902/2005),
p. 7
.

4
Karen Keller:
Cindy Rodriguez, “Population: 1,”
The Boston Globe,
Apr. 19, 2001.

6
folding his
keffiyeh:
Said K. Aburish,
Arafat: From Defender to Dictator
(New York: Bloomsbury, 1998),
p. 82
.

7
a stretched leopard skin:
Stephanie Meece, “A Bird’s Eye View—of a Leopard’s Spots,”
Anatolian Studies
56 (2006),
pp. 1
–16.

8
evolved gradually over millennia:
Angus Stocking, “The World’s Oldest Map,”
The American Surveyor,
June 2006.

9
ancestors of all modern jigsaw puzzles:
Margaret Drabble,
The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009),
p. 111
.

9
“very pretty . . . pale blue”:
Samuel Beckett,
Waiting for Godot
(New York: Grove, 1954),
p. 5
.

9
“map of the world”:
Letter to Charles Darwin, Feb. 1, 1846.
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1844–1846
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 283.

13
“An individual is not”:
Quoted in Edward Relph,
Place and Placelessness
(London: Pion, 1976),
p. 43
.

13
Stephen Dedalus:
James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(New York: Norton, 1916/2007),
p. 13
.

14
asked in a 1985 address:
Peirce Lewis, “Beyond Description,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
75, no. 4 (December 1985), pp. 465–477.

14
geographer Yi-Fu Tuan:
Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values
(New York: Prentice Hall, 1974).

14
no less than W. H. Auden:
Introduction to John Betjeman,
Slick but Not Streamlined
(New York: Doubleday, 1947),
p. 11
.

16
“That map set”:
Quoted in Gianni Granzotto,
Christopher Columbus
(New York: Doubleday, 1985),
p. 57
.

16
“He did not doubt”:
Quoted in Henry Vignaud,
Toscanelli and Columbus
(London: Sands, 1902),
p. 220
.

17
A famous 2000 study:
Eleanor A. Maguire et al., “Navigation-related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
97, no. 8 (April 11, 2000), pp. 4398–4403.

18
grokking diagonals:
Barbara Tversky, “Distortions in Memory for Maps,”
Cognitive Psychology
13 (1981), pp. 407–433.

18
Harm de Blij has claimed:
Harm de Blij,
Why Geography Matters
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
p. 27
.

19
one researcher noted:
Most of these findings about children and maps come from Lynn S. Liben’s work at Penn State. A good summary is her “The Road to Understanding Maps,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
18, no. 6 (December 2009), pp. 310–315.

20
something innate:
This no-longer-fashionable notion was most famously advanced in the “natural mapping” theory of James Blaut.