Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ica's messy tangle of roads on a map, Brink thought, the company should unilaterally des-
ignate a system of routes across the country and choose symbols and numbers for them.
ThenRandMcNallyteamswoulddriveacrossthecountry,relabeling
every single route
by
painting colored stripes and highway logos on telephone poles, like Indian scouts marking
pioneer trails across the Old West. In fact, Rand McNally called the work of these early
Richard Ankroms its “Blazed Trail” program. By 1922, a fifty-thousand-mile network of
numbered, well-marked highways stretched across the country, and state and federal agen-
cies began to follow suit with their own numbering schemes. The modern American road
atlas was born,and sowas its free cousin, the oil-company road map.
Eight billion
ofthese
gas-station maps were printed between 1913 and 1986, the biggest promotional giveaway
of the twentieth century.
TheroadatlashasbecomeinseparablytiedtothatuniquelyAmericanritualofliberation:
theroadtrip.WhenIthinkaboutdrivingarouteacrosstown,Ipicturetheactuallandmarks
involved, but when I plan a trip any longer than an hour, my mental imagery is plucked
straight from Rand McNally. In my mind's eye, highways aren't black striped with yellow.
They're bright blue ribbons with red borders, stretching across a landscape white with ab-
sence:literallytheopenroad.Nationalforestsaremottledblobsconstructed,ifIthinkhard
enough about it, not out of trees but out of a lime-green cerebral cortex of tiny, winding
convolutions. There are trees too, of course: one evergreen apiece in every state park, right
next to a little green triangular tent.
In fact, road atlases have become such a Pavlovian bit of shorthand for travel and inde-
pendence that some mapheads can satisfy their wanderlust without ever leaving home, just
by opening a Rand McNally road atlas. Meet the participants in Jim Sinclair's annual St.
Valentine's Day Massacre, a contest by mail that he's held every February for more than
fortyyears.TheytravelacircuitouscourseacrossAmericafromtheGoldenGateBridgeto
the Statue of Liberty (or the reverse route in odd-numbered years) all without ever leaving
their armchairs or kitchen tables. The journey is made entirely on maps.
The Massacre (like Jim's other yearly map events, the Circum-global Trophy Dash and
the Independence Day Fireworks) was born out of the faddish road rallies held in the
mid-1960s by clubs like the Chicago-based Concours Plains Rallye Team, of which Jim
was a member. These sports car buffs weren't racing for speed, as they do at Monte Carlo.
In these “TSD” (time-speed-distance) rallies, teams navigated a complicated set of driving
directions on public roads at preset speeds, with the aim of passing a series of checkpoints
attheprecisesecondsrequired.Duringthelongmidwesternwinters,whenicyroadsleftthe
drivers housebound, someone suggested a map-based version of a road rally, and in 1964
the first Massacre was held. Jim took the event over in 1968 and in 1980 quit his chemical
engineering job to run the contests full-time.
