Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (49 page)

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Jews were, in fact, Portugal’s secret weapon in its battle with Spain for cartographic supremacy, as is evidenced by the Hebrew letters so often used as symbols on its maps.
Christian mapmakers were constrained
by biblical traditions so goofy that even the Texas Board of Education wouldn’t touch them today, but in the sixteenth century, they trumped geographic accuracy every time. Take 2 Esdras 6:42, for example, which begins, “Upon the third day thou didst command that the waters should be gathered in the seventh part of the earth: six parts hast thou dried up, and kept them.” This text was interpreted to mean that the surface of the earth was only one-seventh water, pretty much the reverse of the actual situation. Medieval maps vastly underestimated the size of the oceans for centuries, with potentially fatal results for mariners.

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Today, Sylvia Wright is best remembered for coining the word “mondegreen” to refer to an oft-misheard song lyric, like “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” The term first appeared in a 1954
Harper’s
essay in which Wright described how, as a child, she misheard the final line of a seventeenth-century ballad—“They hae slain the Earl O’Moray, and laid him on the green”—as “They hae slain the Earl O’Moray, and Lady Mondegreen.”

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You may recall from chapter 1 that chloropleth maps are maps that encode information about different territories by coloring them different shades.

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Stevenson was a devoted map buff and always connected his love for maps to his childhood imagination. In an 1894 magazine essay on
Treasure Island
, he wrote, “
I am told
there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the STANDING STONE or the DRUIDIC CIRCLE on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.”

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Kids probably also enjoy the naughty thrill of tinkering in God’s domain; imaginary mapmakers are, after all, the Dr. Frankensteins of cartography, altering natural land-forms at whim. Wim Delvoye, for example, is a Belgian artist famous for his shocking installations, like the one where he tattoos live pigs or makes stained-glass windows of medical X-rays of his friends having sex in a radiology clinic. His best-known piece is “Cloaca,” a machine that chews up food and digests it into realistic-smelling feces, which he then sells to gallery visitors. But
Delvoye is also the artist
behind “Atlas,” a series of intricately detailed, utterly plausible renderings of imaginary continents. The maps
seem
square in comparison to the rest of Delvoye’s outrageous oeuvre, but in a way they represent something just as transgressive: not just a pig reinvented but a world.

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My favorite childhood video games, whether text adventures like
Zork
or shoot-’emups like the cult classic
Time Bandit,
all had one thing in common: you had to make a map if you wanted to win. Today’s 3-D video games aren’t laid out using the overhead map paradigm I grew up on, but mapping is still important to players. When Sony didn’t release an atlas of its
EverQuest
online game, players simply went ahead and assembled their own.

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Or boys, for that matter, if the young map fan happens to be female and straight, or male and gay. I know of little work exploring the connections between cartophilia and sexual orientation, but the British travel writer Mike Parker says he has nearly a hundred members in his online discussion group for
gay map buffs
. The connection between maps and gender has been
much
more exhaustively studied, as we’ll see in chapter 7.

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The way your eye just wandered down to this footnote.

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Lewis, not surprisingly, was a map fan from a young age. According to his literary executor, Walter Hooper,
Narnia
itself was named after Narni, an Italian town that Lewis came across in a classical atlas when he was a boy.

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Four of the original U.K. hardcovers of
The Chronicles of Narnia
did contain excellent maps by Pauline Baynes, but they didn’t make it into the American editions. Baynes was recommended to Lewis as an illustrator by his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, who loved her drawings, but luckily
she had some cartographic training
as well, having drawn maps for the Ministry of Defence during World War II.

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This seemingly backward way of structuring a narrative is surprisingly common in fantasy fiction. Even Brandon has an unpublished “steampunk” manuscript sitting around someplace that was inspired by a map he’d drawn—in this case, a map of the United States with each of the fifty states reimagined as an individual island. The map-first ethos of fantasy novels is also reflected in the genre of fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. At their simplest level, these games consist of one player drawing a map on a piece of graph paper and then everyone sitting down to find out together what adventures the map will inspire.

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Our world today is full of oddities that resulted from European surveyors never having visited the territories they mapped. Some are harmless quirks, like
Baldwin Street in Dunedin
, New Zealand. The world’s steepest street, it plunges into the Lindsay Creek valley at a precipitous 35 percent grade—the accidental result of a neat grid laid out by London city planners who had never set foot on the actual terrain. But other colonial relics are less amusing. The nice, straight borders of the new Middle East must have looked lovely on paper when Britain and France carved up the region after World War I, but in practice those somewhat arbitrary lines haven’t worked out so well over the last turbulent century.

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One of the great moments in cartographic history, which John Keats butchered in its most famous retelling. In his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Keats spends four lines crediting the discovery to “stout Cortez,” even though Hernán Cortés never even visited Panama.

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In fact, our word “paradise” has a perfectly dull, terrestrial etymology—it comes from the ancient Iranian word “apiri-daeza,” meaning a walled garden or estate. Heaven was more concrete then, less ethereal.

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There’s a confidence that comes from studying a subject so completely. When Caitlin was asked, in her second bee, which country is West Africa’s leading producer of bauxite, she didn’t even break a sweat, because she’d made a list of the natural resources of
every single country in the world
. (The answer is Guinea, but I’m sure you knew that.)

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I was expecting this, though. After seeing firsthand the obsessive study tactics of Caitlin Snaring, I proposed a geography contest: her and me, mano a mano,
Jeopardy!
megachamp versus high school sophomore. Despite not having studied geography for two years, Caitlin took me up on it. I gave her a list of the twenty toughest geography questions that I’d been asked on various TV shows, assuming I could give her a run for her money. She didn’t just beat me; she demolished me nineteen points to eight.

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The terrifying TV of my Reagan-era childhood was all related to nuclear war—
The Day After,
of course, but also this one episode of the sitcom
Benson
in which the cast prepares for Armageddon in a bunker under the governor’s mansion. I am the only person in the world who still has nightmares about
Benson
.

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Well, I’m not the only one who feels a little bit of vertigo when maps change, as London transport officials learned in 2009. The “tube map” of the London Underground was created in 1931 by the engineer Harry Beck, who was inspired by diagrams of electric circuits to create a map that was schematically but not geographically accurate and was paid all of five pounds for his troubles. The map has become part of the fabric of London life, appearing on countless T-shirts, coffee mugs, umbrellas, and so on, and in 2006 was voted
the second best design
in British history (the Concorde came out on top). The last time the city revised the map, it decided it could do without the pale blue line representing the Thames River—do you really need to know where the river is when you’re riding a train?—and erased it. It was thoroughly unprepared for the resulting outcry, as Londoners reacted as if the actual river itself had been dammed. A BBC News editor compared the move to “
removing the smile
from the Mona Lisa.” London Mayor Boris Johnson, in New York on business when the change was made, was furious. “
Can’t believe that the Thames disappeared
off the tube map whilst I was out of the country! It will be reinstated,” he tweeted to his constituents. Maps change, of course—the globe in my office doesn’t have Yugoslavia on it, let alone Pangaea—but we rely on them to pretend at all times that they don’t.

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The Swedish crown jewels
, however, are the only ones that include an orb with
actual continents
enameled on it, perhaps a signal of Sweden’s secret desire for world domination.

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Named for Gilbert Grosvenor, the son-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell, who was the first editor of
National Geographic
magazine.

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The author
Deborah Tannen says
that this is the topic she’s most often asked about from her 1990 best seller on intergender communication,
You Just Don’t Understand.

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Ashley Sims went on to invent “Jellyatrics,” a popular British variety of “gummi”-type candy in which the sweets look like—you guessed it—old people.

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Some members, though, have managed to see all the continents before hitting the age of, well, incontinence. The TCC’s youngest member is Lani Shea, who visited her hundredth country at the tender age of two years, eight months. Her parents, of course, are also club members.

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The number
hovered around 20 percent
before the laws were recently changed to require passports for visits to Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean and has risen only slightly since.

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Because the most remote of the Aleutians lie across the International Date Line, they are also, paradoxically, America’s
easternmost
islands as well—by a certain pedantic definition.

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The odd spelling of “convention” and of the club’s “Keep Klimbin’!” motto aren’t signs of latent Klan sympathies. Rather, the famously thrifty Longacre liked to tell people he owned a used typewriter with a broken C key.

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For many years, the
least accessible U.S. high point
wasn’t the icy, 20,000-foot McKinley but rather 812-foot Jerimoth Hill in Rhode Island. That’s because the only approach to the high point was the driveway of Henry Richardson, a local curmudgeon who would threaten highpointers with physical violence whenever they knocked at his door. Richardson died in 2001, and the Highpointers Club was successful in opening the once-impenetrable summit to visitors.

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State high points must be natural elevations, not manmade ones. Otherwise high-pointers would be hiking the stairs of Chicago’s Willis Tower (the former Sears Tower) and One Shell Square in New Orleans, each of which is taller than any hill in its respective state.

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Winter was born Rafael Lozano, but gets annoyed when the media refers to him by anything else but his self-selected one-name moniker. For many years, Starbucks was opening stores faster than he could visit them, but the recent economic collapse closed nearly a thousand Starbucks, putting his goal within reach. But every closure hurts him, he told
The Wall Street Journal
. If a store closes without him visiting it, “
I would lose
another piece of my soul.” Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Winter.