Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
MEANDER
n
.:
a sinuous bend in a river or other watercourse
You have to fly around the world all day
to keep the sun upon your face.
—STEPHEN MERRITT
T
he oldest surviving road atlases were designed to keep people from having to go any-
whereatall.WhenamedievalcartographerlikeMatthewParisdrewbeautifullyilluminated
maps of holy places and the roads that led there, he was largely targeting an audience of
his fellow monks, who would pore over every step of the journey
without ever leaving their
monasteries
. They were believers in
peregrinatio in stabilitate
: pilgrimages of the heart, not
ofthefeet.Armchairtravelwasfine—notthatanyofthesemonkswouldhavebeenallowed
anything as comfy as an armchair—but if you actually undertook the trip, just think of all
the seductive and licentious temptations that might await you on the road! Well, don't think
about them too much, brothers. Let us pray.
Evenifyoudidn'thaveecclesiasticalreasonstostayclosetohome,amapofRomewould
have been about as useful as a map of Mars. During the Middle Ages, most people lived,
worked, married, and died without ever going farther than twenty miles from their place of
birth. If you were that rare ambitious soul who actually did dream of travel beyond your
home county, your lifetime checklist was probably a single pilgrimage: Canterbury, say, or
Santiago de Compostela, or Jerusalem. That was it. If there had been a travel best seller in
the fifteenth century, it might have been called
One Place to See Before You Die
.
That was pretty much the state of travel for the next five hundred years. When Lord Cast-
lereagh founded the Travellers Club in London in 1819, its membership was limited to gen-
tlemensowelltraveledthattheyhadtohavebeen—canyoubelieveit?—fivehundredmiles
from London. Yep, five hundred miles. A single ski trip to St. Moritz, and you too could
sip cognac in the oak-paneled Travellers Club library alongside the Duke of Wellington and
explorers like Sir Francis Beaufort and Captain Robert FitzRoy of the
Beagle
.
Atransportation revolution—mass railtransit inthenineteenth centuryandthenairtravel
in the twentieth—changed all that. For the first time in human history, it's possible to go
virtually everywhere. And so people have. The north face of Mount Everest, one of the
leasthospitableplacesontheplanet,wascompletely untouchedbyhumanhandsuntil1921.
It's now so overcrowded that climbing teams send up Sherpas weeks ahead of time to grab
primo spots, like teenagers camping out overnight to snag concert tickets, and
international
cleanup efforts
have been needed to remove trash from the cluttered slopes.
