BENCHMARKS - Maphead - page 44

completed until 1992. Today these maps depict every creek, every ridge, and every grove
of trees in the fifty states in remarkable 1:24,000 detail, each mile of territory measuring
almost three full inches on the map. If you were to lay out the whole country in quadrangle
map form—even the blank blue maps representing the middle of Utah's Great Salt Lake,
which probably aren't ordered much—it would stretch 783 feet by 383 feet , the area of
three city blocks.
But the USGS is far from the only federal agency that makes maps. In 2000, the Library
of Congress was contacted by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sounds
like a made-up group from 24 or Alias but is actually the mapping arm of the Department
of Defense. The NGA had 360,000 map sheets sitting in a vault in Arizona that it wanted
togetridof,soHébertsentastafferdowntotakealook.Itturnedouttobeagoldmine:40
percent of the maps were new, so they were brought back to the library for filing. Among
the stuff the NGA had relegated to its yard sale: 1:50,000 coverage of Afghanistan (that's
amazing detail, a little over an inch to a mile) that no one thought they'd need anymore.
But after September 11, 2001, says Hébert, it didn't take long before the Defense Depart-
ment was knocking at his door, wondering if maybe the Library of Congress didn't have
any good tactical maps of Afghanistan, please . . . ? America's heroic map librarians saved
the country's bacon yet again.
The Geography and Map Division serves a broad range of patrons. Some requests are
vitally important to national security, as in the case of the Afghanistan maps. Hébert says
the State Department has lately been checking out lots of ethnological maps of Iraq over
time—where have the Sunnis and Shiites historically lived? What about the Kurds? (Sigh.
Better late than never, I guess.) Other governmental requests are a lot less urgent: the most
common request from members of Congress is for a classy, sepia-toned historical map of
their district that they can hang in their office. Or they might want area maps to help them
understand some issue in their home state: natural resources on an Indian reservation, for
example, or sex offenders living near elementary schools. If all politics is local, so is all
geography—to someone, anyway.
You need to be a high-ranking official to be able to check stuff out from the Geography
and Map Division or any other part of the nation's library. But even if you don't plan on
running for Congress or getting appointed to the Supreme Court anytime soon, you can
still get a library card there. Anybody can. It's called a Reader ID and it's free, and card-
holders can look at maps in the reading room to their hearts' content. Most of the patrons
heretoday,quietlyturningatlaspages,areprivateresearchersofonekindoranother.When
the division began scanning its maps and putting them on the Internet in 1995, they started
withwhatthehistorybuffswanted:theCivilWar,thentherailroads,thentheAmericanRe-
volution,thenWorldWarII.Morethantwentythousandmapsandchartsarenowviewable
online. My favorites are the panoramic maps, beautiful bird's-eye lithographs of American
cities and towns that were fashionable at the turn of the last century. A print of Augustus