Chapter 1
ECCENTRICITY
n.: the deformation of an elliptical map projection
My wound is geography.
âPAT CONROY
They say youâre not really grown up until youâve moved the last box of your stuff out of storage at your parentsâ. If thatâs true, I believe I will stay young forever, ageless and carefree as Dorian Gray, while the cardboard at my parentsâ house molders and fades. I know, everybodyâs parentsâ attic or basement has its share of junk, but the eight-foot-tall mountain of boxes filling one bay of my parentsâ garage isnât typical pack-rat clutter. It looks more like the warehouse in the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The last time I was home, I waded into the chaos in hopes of liberating a plastic bucket of my childhood Legos. I didnât find the Legos, much to my six-year-old sonâs chagrin, but I was surprised to come across a box with my name on the side, written in the neater handwriting of my teenaged self. The box was like an archaeological dig of my adolescence and childhood, starting with R.E.M. mix tapes and Spy magazines on top, moving downward through strata of Star Trek novelizations and Thor comics, and ending on the most primal bedrock of my youthful nerdiness: a copy of Hammondâs Medallion World Atlas from 1979.
I wasnât expecting the Proustian thrill I experienced as I pulled the huge green book from the bottom of the box. Sunbeam-lit dust motes froze in their dance; an ethereal choir sang. At seven years old, I had saved up my allowance for months to buy this atlas, and it became my most prized possession. I remember it sometimes lived at the head of my bed at night next to my pillow, where most kids would keep a beloved security blanket or teddy bear. Flipping through its pages, I could see that my atlas had been as well loved as any favorite plush toy: the gold type on the padded cover was worn, the corners were dented, and the binding was so shot that most of South America had fallen out and been shoved back in upside down.
Today, I will still cheerfully cop to being a bit of a geography wonk. I know my state capitalsâhey, I even know my Australian state capitals. The first thing I do in any hotel room is break out the tourist magazine with the crappy city map in it. My âbucket listâ of secret travel ambitions isnât made up of boring places like Athens or TahitiâI want to visit off-the-beaten-path oddities like Weirton, West Virginia (the only town in the United States that borders two different states on opposite sides) or Victoria Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut (home to the worldâs largest âtriple islandââthat is, the worldâs largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island).* But my childhood love of maps, I started to remember as I paged through the atlas, was something much more than this casual weirdness. I was consumed.
Back then, I could literally look at maps for hours. I was a fast and voracious reader, and keenly aware that a page of hot Roald Dahl or Encyclopedia Brown action would last me only thirty seconds or so. But each page of an atlas was an almost inexhaustible trove of names and shapes and places, and I relished that sense of depth, of comprehensiveness. Travelers will return to a favorite place many times and order the same dish at the same cafĂ© and watch the sun set from the same vantage point. I could do the same thing as a frequent armchair traveler, enjoying the familiarity of sights I had noticed before while always being surprised by new details. Look how Ardmore, Alabama, is only a hundred feet away from its neighbor Ardmore, Tennesseeâbut there are 4,303 miles between Saint George, Alaska, and Saint George, South Carolina. Look at the lacelike coastline of the Musandam Peninsula, the northernmost point of the Arabian nation of Oman, an intricate fractal snowflake stretching into the Strait of Hormuz. Children love searching for tiny new details in a sea of complexity. Itâs the same principle that sold a bajillion Whereâs Waldo? books.
Mapmakers must know thisâthat detail, to many map lovers, is not just a means but an end. The office globe next to my desk right now is pretty compact, but it makes room for all kinds of backwater hamlets in the western United States: Colby, Kansas; Alpine, Texas; Burns, Oregon; Mott, North Dakota (population: 808, about the same as a city block or two of Manhattanâs Upper East Side). Even Ajo, Arizona, makes the cut, and itâs not even incorporated as a townâitâs officially a CDP, or âcensus-designated place.â What do all these spots have in common, besides the fact that no one has ever visited them without first running out of gas? First, they all have nice short names. Second, theyâre each the only thing for miles around. So they neatly fill up an empty spot on the globe and therefore make the product look denser with information.
But I also remember a competing instinct in my young mind: a love for the way maps could suggest adventure by hinting at the unexplored. Joseph Conrad wrote about this urge at the beginning of Heart of Darkness:
Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, âWhen I grow up I will go there.â
When I was a âlittle chap,â there were (and are) still a few mostly blank spaces on the map: Siberia, Antarctica, the Australian outback.* But I knew these lacunae werenât just empty because they were rugged and remote; they were empty because nobody really wanted to live there. These were the places on the Earth that, well, sort of sucked. So I never put my finger on the glaciers of Greenland and said, âI will go there!â like Conradâs Marlow. But I liked that they existed. Even on a map that showed every little Ajo, Arizona, there was still some mystery left somewhere.
And then there were those amazing place-names. My hours with maps featured lots of under-my-breath whispering: the names of African rivers (âLualaba . . . Jubba . . . Limpopo . . .â) and Andean peaks (âAconcagua . . . YerupajĂĄ . . . Llullaillaco . . .â) and Texas counties (âGlasscock . . . Comanche . . . Deaf Smith . . .â) They were secret passwords to entry into other worldsâmore magical, Iâm sure, in many cases, than the places themselves. My first atlas listed, in tiny columns of type under each map, the populations for thousands of cities and towns, and I would pore over these lists looking for comically underpopulated places like Scotsguard, Saskatchewan (population: 3), or Hibberts Gore, Maine (population: 1).â I dreamed of one day living in one of these glamorous spotsâsure, it would be lonely, but think of the level of celebrity! The lone resident of Hibberts Gore, Maine, gets specifically mentioned in the world atlas! Well, almost.
The shapes of places were just as transporting for me as their names. Their outlines were full of personality: Alaska was a chubby profile smiling benevolently toward Siberia. Maine was a boxing glove. Burma had a tail like a monkey. I admired roughly rectangular territories like Turkey and Portugal and Puerto Rico, which seemed sturdy and respectable to me, but not more precisely rectangular places like Colorado or Utah, whose geometric perfection made them false, uneasy additions to the national map. I immediately noticed when two areas had slightly similar outlinesâWisconsin and Tanzania, Lake Michigan and Sweden, the island of Lanai and South Carolinaâand decided they must be geographic soul mates of some kind. To this day, I see British Columbia on a map and think of it as a more robust, muscular version of California, just as the Canadians there must be more robust, muscular versions of Californians.
Separated at birth
These map shapes had a life of their own for me, divorced from their actual territories. Staring at a map for too long was like repeating a word over and over until all meaning is stripped away. Uruguay ceased to represent an actual nation for me; it was just that shape, that slightly lopsided teardrop. I saw these outlines even after the atlas was closed, afterimages floating in my mindâs eye. The knotty pine paneling in my grandparentsâ upstairs bedroom was full of loops and whorls that reminded me of faraway fjords and lagoons. A puddle in a parking lot was Lake Okeechobee or the Black Sea. The first time I saw Mikhail Gorbachev on TV, I remember thinking immediately that his famous birthmark looked just like a map of Thailand.*
By the time I was ten, my beloved Hammond atlas was just one of a whole collection of atlases on my bedroom bookshelf. My parents called them my âatli,â though even at the time I was pretty sure that wasnât the right plural. Road atlases, historical atlases, pocket atlases. I wish I could say that I surveyed my maps with the keen eye of a scientist, looking at watersheds and deforestation and population density and saying smart-sounding things like âAha, that must be a subduction zone.â But I donât think I was that kind of map fan. I wasnât aware of the ecology and geology and history manifest on maps at first; I was just drawn to their scope, their teensy type, and their orderly gestalt. My dad liked maps too, but he preferred the black British atlas in the living room, a Philipâs one from the 1970s in which the maps were all âhypsometric.â Hypsometric maps are those ones that represent terrain with vivid colors: greens for low elevations, browns and purples for high ones. He liked being able to visualize the physical landforms being mapped, but I preferred the clean political maps that Hammond and National Geographic published, where cities and towns stood out neatly on lightly shaded territory and borders were delineated in crisp pastels.
In fact, I dislike hypsometric maps to this day. They look stodgy and old-fashioned to me, something you might see a matronly 1960s schoolteacher straining to pull down in front of a chalkboard.* But itâs more than that. I have to admit that I still like maps for their order and detail as much as for what they can tell us about the real world. A good map isnât just a useful representation of a place; itâs also a beautiful system in and of itself.
Maps are older than writing, so of course we have no written account of some Newtonâs-apple moment in cartography, some prehistoric hunter-gatherer saying, âHey, honey, I drew the worldâs first map today.â Every so often, the newly discovered âworldâs oldest map!â will be announced to great fanfare in scientific journals and even newspaper headlines. But whether the new old map is a cave painting in Spain or a carved mammoth tusk from Ukraine or petroglyphs on a rock by the Snake River in Idaho, these âdiscoveriesâ always have one thing in common: a whole bunch of annoyed scholars arguing that no, thatâs not a map; itâs a pictogram or a landscape painting or a religious artifact, but itâs not really a map. When a cryptic painting was unearthed from the Neolithic Anatolian settlement of ĂatalhöyĂŒk in 1963, its discoverer, James Mellaart, proclaimed the eight-thousand-year-old artifact to be a map of the area. The domino-like boxes drawn at the bottom of the wall represented the village, he claimed, and the pointy, spotted orange shape above them must be the nearby twin-coned volcano of Hasan Dag. Cartographers went nuts, and historians and geologists even combed the painting for clues as to the history of prehistoric eruptions at the site. Thereâs just one hitch: subsequent researchers have decided that the spotted thingy probably isnât meant to be a volcano: itâs a stretched leopard skin. Thatâs not lava spewing forth, just a set of claws. Ergo, the mural was never a map at all. Archaeologistsâ embarrassing inability to tell a leopard and a volcano apart turns out to be the same syndrome that had me seeing coastlines in my grandparentsâ wood paneling. Itâs called âcartacacoethesâ: the uncontrollable compulsion to see maps everywhere.
The ĂatalhöyĂŒk mural. Volcanoes or leopard? You make the call.
Many early protomaps do share some similarities with modern cartography, but itâs a blurry line: their primary significance was probably artistic or spiritual. The essential traits we associate with maps today evolved gradually over millennia. We first see cardinal directions on Babylonian clay tablet maps from five thousand years ago, for instance, but distances donât appear on maps for three thousand more yearsâour oldest such example is a bronze plate from Chinaâs Zhou Dynasty. Centuries more pass before we get to our oldest surviving paper map, a Greek papyrus depicting the Iberian Peninsula around the time of Christ. The first compass rose appears in the Catalan Atlas of 1375. âChoroplethâ mapsâthose in which areas are colored differently to represent different values on some scale, like the red-and-blue maps on election nightâdate back only to 1826.*
But if the historical âdiscoveryâ of maps was a slow and gradual process, the way modern mapheads discover maps as children is more like the way cavemen must have discovered fire: as a flash of lightning. You see that first map, and your mind is rewired, probably forever. In my case, the Ur-map was a wooden puzzle of the fifty states I got as a Christmas present when I was threeâyou know the kind, Florida decorated with palm trees, Washington with apples. On my puzzle, Nebraska, confusingly, wore a picture of a family of pigs. The two peninsulas of Michigan were welded together into a single puzzle piece, so that I believed for years afterward that Michigan was a single landmass in the lumpy shape of a ladyâs handbag.
For other kids, it was the globe in Dadâs study, or the atlas stretched out on the shag carpeting of the living room, or a free gas station map during a family vacation to Yosemite. (Many cases of twentieth-century American map geekdom, it seems, began the same way that many twentieth-century Americans began: conceived in the backseats of Buicks.) But whatever the map, all it takes is one. Cartophilia, the love of maps, is a love at first sight. It must be predestined, written somewhere in the chromosomes.
Itâs 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 âdissected mapsâ 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 âbegatâs and âbeholdâs. Nothing like a dry two-hour sermon on the Book of Lamentations to make a simple relief map look suddenly fascinating by comparison! That single page probably drew more youthful study than the rest of the Good Book put togetherâSamuel Beckett makes a joke in Waiting for Godot about how his two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, have never read the Gospels but remember very clearly that the Dead Sea in their Bible maps was a âvery pretty . . . pale blue.â Joseph Hooker, the great British botanist, once wrote to his close friend Charles Darwin that his first expo...