Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Twenty minutes later, the mutiny is growing. Caitlin is singing to herself on the floor
under the table; Dylan is making loud explosion noises and playing with a toy army man
wearing a parachute. I'm squinting at a map of southern Oregon, trying to count the lakes
I'm passing along U.S. 395. From a car this would be easy; in the atlas, it's surprisingly
headache-inducing. For one thing, I've resorted to a ruler to measure the distance from
each lake to the highway. (By Massacre rules, I can “see” only things that are less than a
quarter inch from the road). Also, I've just realized that instruction 16 placed me “upon”
this highway—not
on
it. This is apparently a crucial distinction. I leave one finger to mark
my spot on the map while flipping through the rules to try to understand the subtle differ-
ences between “on” and “upon.” Suddenly Dylan launches his paratrooper into the air and
it lands right on the atlas where my finger was carefully tracing.
“Dy-
lan
!” I bellow, in full-on Dave-from-the-Chipmunks mode.
“Wow,” says Mindy. “This is just like being on a
real
car trip with Dad!”
Thus ends my ill-advised attempt to try a thirty-hour map exercise with two small chil-
dren. Perhaps, like John Spafford, I'm doomed to be the last map geek in my own gene
pool. I grouchily scoop up my road atlas and my grievances and head off to my office to
continue my virtual road trip in silence.
For the next few weeks, I doggedly spend an hour or so every night on the Massacre.
(NowIknowwhatitmassacres:yourfreetime.)MykidslearntoleavemealonewhenI'm
hunchedovertheroadatlasmutteringthingslike“Golefton191,thengorightonunpaved
road when you see '191' in Wyoming” and moving my finger slowly across the paper as
if all the highways were Braille. It turns out that, despite my fascination with maps of all
kinds,Iamreally,phenomenallybadatmaprallying.Atonepointduringthesecondweek,
I find myself in west Texas when I can infer from the directions that I'm still supposed to
be in Colorado. When I finally figure out where I went wrong and get back to the Rockies,
ittakesmeafullhourtoinchmywayfromCañonCity,Colorado,tonearbyPueblo.That's
longer than it would take me to actually
drive
those forty miles.
Ibegintosecretlyhopethewholethingwillturnouttobeaprank,likethoseelementary
school tests in instruction-following that begin with “Read all the instructions before be-
ginning,” then march you down a list of pointless, labyrinthine directions only to end with
something like “Ignore all the previous steps. Leave your page blank except for your name
at the top, and hand it in.” But as the days stretch into weeks and I wind my way through
Kansas and Nebraska, my hopes dim. So does my vision. Every time I go back to recheck
my answers, I somehow wind up following the same deterministic instructions onto differ-
ent highways entirely. Theoretical physicists take note: the Massacre instructions appear to
occupy some kind of nexus of quantum-level uncertainty. Schrödinger's Road Trip.
On a road trip, when you start to lose it, you should pull over for the night. Jim allows
rookies like me to mail in answers after completing only four of the Massacre's eight legs,
