Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
“She was smart as a whip,” he says ruefully. “That was her great disappointment, never
finishing school.”
“Did she still like to look at maps when you were married?”
“Well, she believed in history. In the 1960s she started attending genealogy seminars,
and you couldn't do genealogy without telling the history of a town or an area. Hanging
over my bed—her bed—is a
National Geographic
map of New England. She traced her
family all the way back to colonial days and then back to England. I still have the map. I
haven't moved a lot of her stuff.” He pauses to think. “Maybe I should, but I haven't done
it.”
I like the notion that I come from a long heritage of maps, that I belong in a long line
of keepers of the flame, like a cartographic version of the Knights Templar. I know from
my grandma's years of genealogy work that her family was descended from the Mormon
pioneers who settled Utah beginning in 1847. This means, I suppose, that I wouldn't even
exist
withoutthosegreatnineteenth-centurymapsoftheWestthatIglimpsedintheLibrary
of Congress. Without the maps of one Charles Preuss, the German-born cartographer for
JohnC.Frémont'sexpeditions,BrighamYoungwouldneverhavemadeittotheGreatSalt
Lake.
But I've been worried of late that I might not have passed along my map genes in robust
enoughfashion.Myownkids,despiteadoptinganewall-consumingobsessioneveryweek
or so, have never seemed too interested in maps. We bought them a wall-sized cloth U.S.
mapfromFAOSchwarzafewChristmasesagoandhungitintheplayroom,butI'venever
seen them spend much time with it. At the moment, all the little Velcro pieces (landmarks
and crops and whatnot) are randomly stuck onto the waters of the Gulf of Mexico—the
only part of the map that my three-year-old can reach. They both love the GPS navigator
in our car, but “Daniel” gives driving directions so well that you never
have
to look at a
map—he's the antimap, in many ways. Obviously my love for my children doesn't depend
onwhetherornottheyknowthatSantaFe,NewMexico,isthehighest-altitudestatecapital
orthatThimphu,thecapitalofBhutan,hasnotrafficlights.ButIrememberhowimportant
maps were to me at their age, and I'd like to be able to share that joy again with them, now
that I'm a cranky old geonerd instead of a starry-eyed young one.
I poke my head into Dylan's room one night to tuck him into bed. “Nine o'clock, guy.
Lights out.”
“Are you almost done with your map topic?” he asks sleepily.
Heasksthisalot,butoutofpureself-interest,notcartophilia.“Themapbook”isalways
the reason I give when I can't play with him every waking hour. You want me to wear a
ninja mask while you shoot suction-cup-tipped Nerf bullets at my forehead? Sorry, map
book.
“Actually, I'm almost done,” I say. “Today I was trying to figure out which parts of the
topic should actually have maps to illustrate them.”
