Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
I suspect that Todd and I are far from alone in this—that many people's hunger for maps
(mappetite?) peaks in childhood. In part, this is due to the fact that nobody is ever as ob-
sessed about
anything
as a crazed seven-year-old is; this week I'm sure my son, Dylan,
thinksaboutdinosaursmorethananyadultpaleontologistever.Nextweekit'llprobablybe
spaceships or Venus flytraps or sports cars.
Buttheredoesseemtobesomethingaboutmapsthatmakesthemspecificallyirresistible
to children. Consider: most square, old-timey hobbies are taken up in middle age as a
way to mortify one's teenage children. That's when Dad suddenly gets obsessed with Dix-
ieland jazz or bird-watching or brewing lager in the basement. Not so with map love,
which you catch either during your Kool-Aid years or not at all. In fact, I remember my
map ardor abruptly cooling around puberty—you discover pretty quickly that it's not a hit
with girls to know the names of all the Netherlands Antilles. In college, I briefly had a
pleasant-but-bookish CanadianroommatenamedSheldon.(Note:Nerdyfirstnamenotfic-
tionalized for this story!) Sheldon moved into the apartment first that September and had
the whole place—living room, kitchen, bedrooms—papered with dozens of
National Geo-
graphic
mapsbythetime therestofusarrived. Irolled myeyesandresigned myself tothe
fact that we were never going to see a single girl inside the apartment. But in third grade,
I'm sure I would have been over the moon at this development, making Sheldon pinky-
swear to be my BFF and drawing detailed maps of Costa Rica on the back of his Trapper
Keeper.
See, in elementary school, I was convinced that I was the only one in the world who felt
like this. None ofmy friends, Iwas sure, ran home to their atlases after school. Inthe years
since then, I've become vaguely aware that this, whatever it is, is a thing that exists: that
some fraction of humanity loves geography with a strange intensity. I'll see a three-year-
oldon
Oprah
whocanpointouteverycountryonaworldmapandthink,hey,thatwasme.
I'll read about a member of the Extra Miler Club who has visited all 3,141 counties in the
United States or about an antique map of the Battle of Yorktown selling at auction for a
million dollars. AndI'll wonder: where does this come from? It'seasy to see from my own
life story, my
Portrait of the Autist as a Young Man,
that these mapheads are my tribe, but
I'm mystified by our shared tribal culture and religion. Why did maps mean—why
do
they
still mean, I guess—so much to me? Maps are just a way of organizing information, after
all—notnormallythekindofthingthatspawnsobsessivefandom.I'veneverheardanyone
professanyparticularlovefortheDeweyDecimalSystem.I'venevermetapie-chartgeek.
I suppose indexes are good at what they do, but do they inspire devotion?
Theremustbesomethinginnateaboutmaps,aboutthisonespecificwayofpicturingour
world and our relation to it, that charms us, calls to us, won't let us look anywhere else
in the room if there's a map on the wall. I want to get to the bottom of what that is. I see
it as a chance to explore one of the last remaining “blank spaces” available to us amateur
