Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
andintheendthat'swhatIdo.StrandedinSouthDakota,doomedneverto“see”theStatue
of Liberty at the finish line, I admit defeat and mail in my answer sheet.
Threeweekslater,Igetane-mailfrom“theOldMaltese,”lettingmeknowthatIfinished
in first place! Well, I finished first among first-time contestants who, like me, wimped out
halfway. All six of them. Still, my final score of sixteen isn't bad—that's sixteen missed
questions out of forty-eight. As in golf, the lowest score wins. Bart Bramley is one of six
entrants this year with a perfect score of zero, handing him his fifth Massacre win. Maybe
the LASIK will have to wait one more year.
Whenthecomplete answersheetarrivesinthemail,Inoticewithagroanthatoneofmy
sixteen goofs was the very first Massacre question: do you see Berkeley or San Francisco
first driving east across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge? How did we manage to blow
that one? Reopening the atlas, I see my mistake. In my careful perusal of the teensiest map
text, I'd managed to miss a much bigger feature: San Francisco
County,
stretching almost
all the way across the bay.
IshouldhavelistenedtoEdgarAllanPoe.Waybackin1844,inhisclassicmysterystory
“The Purloined Letter,” Poe has his detective, Dupin, say the following:
There is a game
of puzzles which is played upon a map. One party playing re-
quires another to find a given word—the name of a town, river, state or em-
pire—any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A
novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them
the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch,
in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-
largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of be-
ing excessively obvious.
*
In my conversations with roadgeeks and map rallyers, I marveled at their endless com-
pulsionforprecision,whichstruckmeasthepolaroppositeofthekindofKerouacianfree-
dom that the American road has come to symbolize. On a
real
road trip, I sneered, you
wouldn't worry about the typeface of the interstate signs or the history of their numbering.
You certainly wouldn't limit your sightseeing to places within a quarter-map-inch of the
road you were on. Or even
upon
.
But maybe Dupin was right: by focusing on these tiniest, geekiest details, I've been
missing the big picture about roadfans. If this hobby were just about
arbitrary
detail,
Jim Sinclair could mail out a copy of
The Betty Crocker Cookbook
to his players every
year and have them follow circuitous and confusing directions to bake Lemon Chiffon
Cake.Roadgeekscouldobsessaboutanythingwithaniceregularnumberingsystem:base-
ball cards or tornadoes or Mozart sonatas. But instead they chose maps as their vehicle.
