RELIEF - Maphead - page 171

eries would be the last river and the last mountain range ever added to the map of the con-
tiguous United States. Before Thompson's expedition, travelers had referred to the Henry
range as “the Unknown Mountains,” and Navajo in the area still call it Dzil Bizhi' Adini,
“the mountain whose name is missing.” But that's not true anymore: now all is named, all
is neatly catalogued, just as the mapmakers thought they wanted. That frontier is gone.
Of course, the human yen for advancement didn't end when Conrad's “blank spaces”
on the map were gone. We have turned our attention to “mapping” other things, like outer
spaceandthehumangenome,butforthoseofushardwiredtoorganize theworldspatially,
cartographically, something is still missing. We're not content with discovering things that
must be fuzzily visualized—quarks and quasars. We wish we could still discover real
places, places we could visit, places that could surround us.
Andsowereinventexploration,albeitonasmallerandlessperilousscale.Wefindways
to make even the most banal places new—by organizing them into made-up checklists, by
plantinggeocachesintheparksthere,byphotographingtheexitsignsofthehighwaysrun-
ning through them, by studying their pixels in unprecedented detail on the Internet. Oth-
ers forsake tidy modern maps altogether. Some recapture a sense of mystery with antique
maps, with their wildly inaccurate coastlines and tentacled monstrosities at the margins.
Others wander paths that are still unexplored because they exist only in the imagination.
When I was a child, I could always add to a completed map of some fantasy kingdom
simply by Scotch-taping a new piece of paper at one edge and continuing to draw. There
will be no depressingly final “Potato Creek” on these inexhaustible maps.
It's been therapeutic for me to meet so many different kinds of geo-nuts. I can see that
their rich diversity of obsessions all seem to be expressions of the very same gene, and it's
the same instinct that made me an atlas collector at the same time that all my friends were
more into He-Man and Knight Rider . But I've been most surprised by the response from
friendswhofindoutwhatI'mwritingabout.Sincechildhood,I'veexpectedpeopletosnort
at the idea of maps being a bona fide hobby, so when I say, “It's a topic about people who
like maps,” it comes out like an apology. Instead, those turn out to be the magic words that
make me a secret confidant, a father confessor.
Laurie Borman, the editorial director at Rand McNally, said to me, “When I tell people
where I work, you wouldn't believe how many people tell me, 'Really? I love maps!' It's
more than you would think. But you can tell they think it's sort of an embarrassing confes-
siontobeamapgeek.”That'sexactlywhatIfindfrommyfriendsaswell—evenonesI've
known for years, ones I'd never expect to be closet map fans.
“I can kill a whole afternoon just looking at rare maps on dealers' websites,” says one
friend. I knew he worked from home, but I had always naively assumed he was actually
getting some work done sometimes. “Just drooling, not buying. It's like porn in our house-
hold.”