LEGEND - Maphead - page 76

Chapter 6
LEGEND

n .: an explanatory list of the symbols on a map

Most of us , I suppose, have a secret country, but for most
of us it is only an imaginary country.

—C. S. LEWIS

I n September 1931, Austin Tappan Wright was driving east across the country, returning
from a visit to California at the end of his summer break at the University of Pennsylvania,
where he taught corporate law. A few miles outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, he was killed
in a tragic car accident, leaving behind a wife and four young children. Wright had grown
up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father, a prominent Greek scholar, was the dean
of Harvard's graduate school. He studied at Harvard and Oxford, practiced law in Boston,
andthenturnedtoteaching,atBerkeleyandPenn.Butonlyhisfamilyknewthatformostof
his forty-eight years, he had also lived somewhere else entirely: the remote Southern Hemi-
sphere nation of Islandia.
Islandia is a tiny kingdom at the southern tip of the Karain sub-continent, isolated from
the rest of the world by the impassable Sobo Steppes and hundreds of miles of trackless
ocean. Its people are peaceful and agrarian and have for centuries resisted the influence of
outsiders. In fact, the national assembly passed the Hundred Law in 1841, limiting the num-
ber of foreign visitors to no more than one hundred at any given time. But that isolation
was no obstacle to Wright, who was able to become the West's foremost expert on Islandia
while circumventing the Hundred Law entirely. You see, he had invented the entire nation
and its geography, its people and history and language and culture, all out of whole cloth, as
a young boy. Islandia, though intricate and fully realized, is an entirely fictional country.
WrightrarelymentionedIslandiatooutsiders,buthisfamilyknewaboutit,andknewthat
somepartofhimwasalwaysthere.“ ThisviewlookslikeIslandia , ”theywouldhearhimre-
markattimes,ashestudiedsomelandscapethatmusthaveremindedhimofthevividutopia
in his mind's eye. He named the family sailboat Aspara, the Islandian word for “seagull.”
When he died, he left behind the work on which he'd spent over twenty years: twenty-
three hundred longhand pages describing every aspect of Islandian life, from the sarka
plum liqueur enjoyed by its inhabitants to the candles, shielded from the wind by waxed
paper, that light the streets of its capital city. He may never have intended anyone else
to read it, but his widow, Margot, taught herself to type and transcribed the entire text.
Wright'soldestdaughter,Sylvia,wholater became asuccessful humoristandessayist inher