Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
treasure map, would never have been written if not for Stevenson's young stepson Lloyd,
who passed a rainy summer painting watercolor maps with his stepfather in their Scottish
cottage. The place-names they hand-lettered onto the map, like “Skeleton Island” and
Pan's home isle of Neverland, he purposefully imitated the cartography of children:
I don't know
whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind. Doctors
sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become in-
tensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which
isnotonlyconfused,butkeepsgoingroundallthetime.Therearezigzaglineson
it,justlikeyourtemperatureonacard,andtheseareprobablyroadsintheisland,
for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of
colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and
savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through
which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to
decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.
When I was in the third grade, my friend Gerald and I were kings of twin monarchies
called Oofer and Uffer. (I am now seeing those names written down for the first time in
twenty-five years.) I can still picture the maps we drew: Oofer is in orange crayon, Uffer
green, and a long narrow strait of cerulean sea separates them, running from east to west.
But
why
did we draw the maps? I haven't the foggiest notion. In hopes of refreshing my
memory, I pay a visit to Benjamin Salman, a Seattle eighth-grader who is, I imagine, what
Austin Tappan Wright must have been like at fourteen.
Like Wright, Benjamin is the offspring of gifted parents: his father, Mark, is a concert
pianist, and his mother, Sarah, is, quite literally, a rocket scientist. (She used to be an en-
gineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,where she worked onthe
Voyager
probes; nowshe
teaches math at a nearby university.) Their living room is a pleasantly cluttered space full
of antique furniture, musical instruments, stacks of books and
National Geographics
, and
papier-mâché masks hung on the walls. Benjamin is crouched on the wooden floor in front
of me, spreading out a grid of eighteen sheets of typing paper.
“This is Augusta, one of the largest cities in Alambia,” he tells me. “It is a complete,
exhaustive map.” It's a
Thomas Guide
of the imagination, with thousands of nonexistent
streets, parks, and businesses meticulously laid out and labeled. “But this one”—he begins
spreading out a map of his entire continent—“will never be finished.”
Benjamin's own Islandia is actually a modified version of the real-world continent of
Australia, moved northward and tilted at a rakish 30-degree angle, “for geographic di-
versity,” he explains in his offhand, slightly elevated way of talking. He's sitting on the
sofa now with his knees around his chin, occasionally chewing on a knuckle. “The actual
