TRANSIT - Maphead - page 123

elementary school, and his fourth graders begin every school day with a little geography
exercise, tracing highway routes with dry-erase marker on a state map at the back of his
classroom. “By the end of the year,” he boasts, “my sharp ones can tell highways just by
the shape of the shield. 'Aha, this is U.S. 12!' “
Mark, on the other hand, has landed the roadgeek's dream job: he works for the Wash-
ington State Department of Transportation, in charge of the state's official highway map.
Back in Tacoma, we say good-bye as he drops me and John off by our respective cars. The
last I see of him as he pulls away is the personalized license plate on the back of his Ford
Taurus: “MAPPER,” with a surround that reads, “I'm not lost / I'm a cartographer.”
Driving home to Seattle, I pass the stadiums where the Seahawks play football and the
lowly Mariners play something not entirely unlike baseball. Just a block east from the
sports fields, I realize, is the western terminus of Interstate 90. I remember once driving
pastthaton-rampwithmyson,Dylan,afteraballgame.“Ifyougotonthathighwaythere,”
I told him, “the road wouldn't end until you got all the way to Boston Harbor. It stretches
all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.”
Dylan was transfixed by the idea and begged to drive to Boston that very night . (It was
getting kind of late, so we just got ice cream instead.) I remember having my mind blown
bythesamenotionasakid,thatallroadswereessentiallyconnectedandthatourdriveway
was the start of a continuous river of asphalt and Portland cement that might end at Dis-
neyland or the Florida Keys or Tierra del Fuego. Today I can't see the same mental picture
without wincing at some of the uglier results of America's century of road and automo-
bile culture: suburban sprawl, rush-hour traffic, air pollution, those bumper stickers where
Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes pees on the Chevy logo. But as a child, my romance with
the roads in my atlases and stretching out from my front door was unclouded by any real-
life complications. They were only space and potential.
ThesizeofAmerica makesournational fascination withmapsdifferentfromcartophilia
in other parts of the world—Britain, for instance. As you might expect from a nation so
geeky that it once put the Daleks from Doctor Who on a postage stamp, the British are
second to none in their love of maps, and their government Ordnance Survey's “Explorer”
maps, with their iconic orange covers, still sell in the millions every year . But there is
something cozy and fiddly about map love across the pond. The British take pride in cre-
ating scaled-down versions of the countryside in exhaustive detail, as if it were a model
railroad landscape or miniature Christmas village in a shop window. In his topic Notes on
a Small Island, the American travel writer Bill Bryson remembers sitting down on a stone
bench while hiking in the Dorset hills and pulling out a map to get his bearings.
Coming from a country where mapmakers tend to exclude any landscape feature
smallerthan,say,Pike'sPeak,Iamconstantlyimpressedbytherichnessofdetail