ECCENTRICITY - Maphead - page 7

whatever the map, all it takes is one. Cartophilia, the love ofmaps, is a love at first sight. It
must be predestined, written somewhere in the chromosomes.
It's been this way for centuries. That wooden map puzzle that took my map virginity
when I was three? Those date back to the 1760s, when they were called “dissected maps”
and were wildly popular toys, the ancestors of all modern jigsaw puzzles . For Victorian
children, the most common first map was a page in a family or school Bible, since a map
of the Holy Land was often the only color plate in a vast sea of “begat“s and “behold“s.
Nothing like a dry two-hour sermon on the Book of Lamentations to make a simple re-
lief map look suddenly fascinating by comparison! That single page probably drew more
youthful study than the rest of the Good Book put together—Samuel Beckett makes a joke
in Waiting for Godot abouthowhistwocharacters,VladimirandEstragon,haveneverread
the Gospels but remember very clearly that the Dead Sea in their Bible maps was a “ very
pretty . . . pale blue . ” Joseph Hooker, the great British botanist, once wrote to his close
friend Charles Darwin that his first exposure to maps had been a Sunday school “ map of
the world before the flood” that he said he spent hours of his “tenderest years” studying.
Thatonemapledtohislifelonginterestinexplorationandscience,duringwhichhehelped
Darwin develop the theory of evolution.
In the twentieth century, when kids were spending less time in front of Bibles, the inev-
itable map on their schoolroom wall served the same purpose: something to stare at when
a dull monologue on fractions or Johnny Tremain started to turn into the wordless “wah-
wah” drone of the teacher from a Peanuts TV special. I just now realized why I know all
the Australian state capitals, in fact: my desk in second grade was right next to the bulletin
board that had the world map on it. My head was just inches from Darwin and Adelaide
and, um, Hobart. (See? I still got it.) If I'd been a little taller then, I might be an expert on
Indonesia or Japan today instead.
Recently I was driving my friend Todd to the airport, and, while talking about his va-
cation plans, he outed himself as a bit of a geography nerd. (I'd known Todd for years,
incidentally, but was only now finding out we had this in common. Map people sometimes
live for years in the closet, cartophilia apparently being one of the last remaining loves that
dare not speak their names.) He boasted that, thanks to the hours of his childhood he'd
spent poringover atlases, he could still rattle offthe names ofevery world capital, sothat's
how we spent the rest of the drive. We both discovered that the capitals we stumbled over
weren't the obscure ones (Bujumbura, Burundi! Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago!) but
rather major European cities like Bratislava, Slovakia, and Kiev, Ukraine. Why? Because
thesecitieshadcommittedthecrimeofbecomingnationalcapitals after theendoftheCold
War, when Todd and I weren't map-memorizing nine-year-olds anymore! Apparently our
knowledge of geography is like your grandparents' knowledge of personal computers: it
ends in 1987.