Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (50 page)

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Hogenauer completed his national park quest in Alaska in 1980 and says that twenty-five years went by before anyone else took credit for the same feat. “Which is obscene!” he exclaims. “They’re fabulous places to visit, and you and I are paying millions a year to maintain them, and twenty-five years go by before someone else sees them all?” Today the National Park Service runs a “passport” program in which visitors can stamp a little booklet at every park site, an attempt to turn every American into a “systematic traveler.”

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I wonder if Veley will ever get the chance to visit
the island of Ferdinandea
, a submerged volcano that occasionally rises out of the Mediterranean south of Sicily only to subside or erode again. The last time it emerged, in 1831, it led to a wave of tourism, as well as diplomatic arguments over who owned the territory. Ferdinandea last made news when the United States bombed it in 1986, mistaking it for a Libyan submarine, but scientists predict that recent volcanic activity could lead to a reappearance sometime soon.

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The Lemon Charlie was the result of the Ritz bartender’s five-year attempt to duplicate a limoncello cocktail that Charles and his wife had once tasted on the Amalfi Coast. Moss is actually the one who named the drink, when she inadvertently mangled the word “limoncello.”

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There are kinder variants, like “road buff” and “roadfan,” but more elaborate coinings, like “odologist” and “viaphile,” have yet to catch on.

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The western I-76 used to be numbered I-80S until 1975, when officials began removing the letter suffixes from highway designations.

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Visitors to the Mountain State take note: the top number is the main route from which the county route branches, and the bottom number tells you which branch.

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A control city is the likely destination listed on freeway signage. On a junction where one lane is marked as continuing I-380 north toward Cedar Rapids, while the right-hand lane is marked as exiting to I-80 west and Des Moines, the control cities are Cedar Rapids and Des Moines.

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Not every single mile
in every lane,
though. That would just be silly.

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To injuries—no deaths were reported, thankfully.

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The old sign, to Ankrom’s chagrin, was crushed in a bale of scrap metal and sent off to China. Just like Gustave Courbet’s
The Stone Breakers
and William Blake’s
A Vision of the Last Judgment,
another priceless work of art lost to the ages.

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Companies like Google are still facing these issues as they develop driving directions for parts of the world without widely used addressing systems. Their solution has been similar to Rand McNally’s: base directions on landmarks, not street names. Instead of being told, “Head south on Bannerghatta Rd, then turn left on Hosur Main Rd,” a driver in Bangalore, India, might see, “Head south toward the hospital, then turn left at the end of the road.” Even landmark-based driving isn’t foolproof, though. Google GIS specialist Jessica Pfund told me about a Pakistani user of Google Map Maker who had always used the bright blue wall next to his house as a handy navigational landmark. Last week, he complained to her, the wall had been painted gray, and now nobody could find him.

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Billy Wilder used the same gimmick in his underrated 1943 war movie
Five Graves to Cairo
. The titular “graves” are actually materiel caches scattered across the Sahara. Their locations turn out to be hidden on the map in exceedingly simple fashion: they were left at the spots where the letters E, G, Y, P, and T stretch out across the desert, spelling “Egypt” on the map.

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This historic first geocache is long gone by now, but a new cache, complete with commemorative plaque, was placed at the site by “Team360” in 2003 for the convenience of cachers making a pilgrimage. The Original Can of Beans, or OCB, was found nearby by Team360 on that occasion and has become an honored relic, unveiled to hushed silences at geocaching gatherings as if it were the finger bone of a saint or a splinter of the True Cross.

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If true, this would explain virtually every hobby ever concocted by man, from golfers to stamp collectors to those frightening old people you see running metal detectors over the dirt at parks and beaches.

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The geocaching community still sits at a unique Venn-diagram intersection between indoor and outdoor types. The early GPS units all had rugged model names that sounded like SUVs—Venture, SportTrek, Oregon—despite the fact that many of them were being bought by bookish gadgeteers.

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For evidence that Irish’s site was crucial to geocaching’s growth, look no further than some of the other GPS games that have appeared more recently, like Geodashing (essentially geocaching to randomly chosen points), Shutterspot (geocaching from photo clues), and GeoVexilla (a global game of capture the flag). All are well-designed games, but they’re still played by dozens or hundreds worldwide, not geocaching’s millions.

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Yes, some cachers annoyingly append the prefix “geo-” to every other word. The effect is a little like characters in a 1950s science-fiction movie who eat “space fruit” for “space breakfast” in their “space kitchen.”

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The first team to recover Psycho Urban Cache #13 used an elaborate system of ropes, lines, and magnets to snag and replace the cache without ever leaving terra firma; the second team managed to place an anchor on top of the tower with a bow and arrow and then scaled its sheer stone sides.

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This cache was actually left by none other than Richard “Lord British” Garriott, the video game developer whose
Ultima
series I spent much of my childhood playing (and mapping). Garriott, the son of a former NASA astronaut, has also been to space: he was the sixth “space tourist” to board the International Space Station.

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Ventura_kids first took the world speed record in the summer of 2009, notching 413 smileys on the roads around the Denver Airport to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of fellow cacher “EMC of Northridge, CA,” who, along with “f0t0m0m,” accompanied the Kids on their record-breaking run. EMC is actually Elin Carlson, an accomplished soprano whose nerdiest claim to fame, aside from her prolific geocaching career, is the fact that she sings the ethereal “oo-
wooooo
” vocals for the latest incarnation of the
Star Trek
theme.

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Scubasonic, whom we will meet in a moment, has been questioned by police no fewer than twenty-five times.

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Six weeks after placing the first cache, Dave Ulmer predicted this very problem, becoming so alarmed at the eco-Frankenstein he’d created that he posted on June 17, 2001, “
OK, OK
. I Give Up! All development on the sport of Geocaching should cease.” It was too late.

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In fact, Scott and his entire party were lost in a blizzard on the return trip. Geocachers, thankfully, generally face much lower stakes.

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That’s right: when you’re caching for numbers, says van der Bokke, “Left turns in urban environments are absolute killers. You’re sitting at the light. You’re sitting, you’re sitting, you’re sitting. Then you have to make another left turn to get back out!” “Wait,
that’s
the secret of your success?” I ask incredulously. “No left turns?” “That’s one of them.”

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In the same chapter in which he invented the life-sized map, incidentally, Lewis Carroll went on to invent the modern sport of paintball. No, really. “Mein Herr” tells the children of a planet on which, when war was waged, “The bullets were made of soft black stuff, which marked everything it touched. So, after a battle, all you had to do was to count how many soldiers on each side were ‘killed’—that means ‘marked on the back,’ for marks in front didn’t count.”

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Aerial photogrammetry is the technology that finally replaced large-scale trigonometric surveys as the state of the mapmaking art. It’s much older than Google Earth, though—during the Peninsular Campaign of the Civil War, General George McClellan ordered some of his officers to ascend five hundred feet in a tethered silk balloon and make maps of the Confederate lines. The new West Point grad who spent the most time in the balloon, in fact, was none other than the young
George Armstrong Custer
. A century later, the very first U.S. military satellites were equipped with high-resolution cameras for taking aerial photos but had no way to develop the film or transmit its images back to Earth. As a result, the satellites were designed to
drop film packets
into the atmosphere with parachutes, where they could be retrieved in midair (most of the time, anyway) by a military transport plane.

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Yes, Google actually unveiled a Street View snowmobile when it published these photos during the 2010 Winter Olympics. During my visit to the Googleplex, I met Dan Ratner, who has helped design every vehicle in the Street View fleet. In addition to the cars and snowmobiles, there’s also a “trike,” which Ratner dreamed up during a visit to Barcelona when he noticed that many of the cobblestoned streets were too narrow for the regular Google cars. The trike has since been used to map national parks and theme parks, but whenever it rolls out, bystanders unaccountably mistake it for an ice cream vendor. Kids in Legoland asked the driver for ice cream, but so did a famous Nobel laureate once at a technology conference. Ratner also showed me the newest member of the Street View family: a trolley capable of capturing
indoor
imagery. Nobody would tell me where exactly the trolley will be filming. The Louvre? The Taj Mahal? The Playboy Mansion? It was top secret.

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Which is why the element was named for the Greek sun god, Helios.

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One odd curio that isn’t trotted out much in the Google press materials is
the so-called forest swastika
discovered in the 1990s in aerial photographs of northeastern Germany. During the 1930s heyday of the Third Reich, Nazi officials apparently planted a swastika of larch trees in a Brandenburg pine forest. The effect was invisible except during a few weeks each spring and autumn, when the paler larch leaves branded a bright yellow swastika across the treetops. The offending trees were cut down after German tabloids ran photos of the swastika in 2000.

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Rhumb lines are also called “loxodromes,” which always sounds to me more like the name of some iffy pharmaceutical. “Ask your doctor if Loxodrome is right for you!”

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Even Mercator knew that his projection screwed up the poles. His very first map of the kind left off the Arctic entirely, displaying it as a special little polar inset, the way we do Alaska and Hawaii.

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The only way to see all of a round globe from the same vantage point with no distortion is to visit the Mapparium, a wonderful Boston oddity built by the Christian Science Church in 1935. The Mapparium is a thirty-foot-tall globe of stained glass that visitors stand
inside
(passing through on an equatorial bridge), their eyes at the same distance from every point on Earth at once. Because of the difficulty of replacing the globe’s 608 glass panels, the map is frozen in the year of its completion, still displaying long-gone places like Bechuanaland, Trucial Oman, and the Netherlands Indies to curious tourists.

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Peters’s commitment to social justice started early; his father, Bruno, had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1945 for labor union activism and would have been executed had the war not ended shortly thereafter.

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For a very good reason: to preserve right angles in close-up. The earliest version of Google Maps used a better projection, but as a result, streets in high-latitude Scandinavian cities met at wonky angles.