A Little Bit of Map Love

I just finished reading the book Maphead by Ken Jennings (you know, the guy who won Jeopardy! a million times...). He wrote the book to give all of us a look into the secret lives of map-lovers. I love to look at a map as much as anyone, but clearly the people Jennings interviews are on a completely different level (a level Jennings resides on as well). Reading this book was excellent timing, considering our recent extreme road trip.

Jennings talks in the book about the kids who compete in the National Geographic Bee (similar to the Spelling Bee, but ridiculously more interesting!). We walked past the theatre in DC several times where the Bee is held each year, but we missed the throng of contestants by a few weeks. From ancient to modern, his book covers map lovers, map writers, and map interpreters throughout the centuries. For example, contrast the Travellers Club in London in 1819, who limited its membership to men who had travelled at least 500 miles from their city, with the modern Travelers' Century Club, founded in Southern California in 1954, which includes more than 2,000 members who have each visited at least 100 different countries in their lifetime. While many members are much older than I am, the youngest member ever to join this club was only 2 1/2 when she qualified, and at 37, Charles Veley became the first member to finish the entire club's checklist, visiting all 319 'countries' on the approved list.

I don't think I'm ready for that kind of commitment, but I felt endeared to many of the other 'clubs' in the book. Jack Longacre founded the Highpointers Club, a group of people who try to visit the highest point in each of the 50 states. And in case you're scared of heights, you might like to know that Delaware's highest point is in a trailer park. Ohio's is a school flagpole, and the highest point in Florida is only 345 feet above sea level (at a rest stop) - lower than many of the skyscrapers in the state. Apparently only five states require climbing skills, and at one point the most difficult height to scale wasn't Mt McKinley (at 20,000 feet) but the 800-ft hill in Rhode Island that lay on the property of a cranky old man who would not grant access. He died in 2001, allowing members access at last. When Longacre died of cancer in 2002, members of the club scattered his ashes on the top of all 50 high points.

Looking for something more personalized? You could join Peter Holden, who has eaten at 12,000 McDonald's restaurants, or Rafael Lozano, who has been to all but 20 of the 8,500 Starbucks in North America. One man has made a checklist of his checklists, visiting "every site in the national park system, all eleven parishes of Barbados, all 30 'historic houses of worship' in Philadelphia, all 51 weather stations in Thailand, and every US Presidential birthplace". You could make up just about any list, just to check it off. Tempting. 

Or maybe you're one of the people who drive the roads every day, looking at signs, checking directions, and correcting mistakes, like the "roadgeeks" in Chapter 9. If you knew that Hwy 99 used to run from the Canadian border all the way to Mexico, maybe you are a roadgeek. Most of highway 99 was abandoned when I-5 was completed in 1968. The roadgeek in the book has a customized plate that says MAPPER, with a frame that says "I'm not lost. I'm a cartographer."

I'm not sure who would be surprised that I may entertain joining one of the above groups someday. I'm not ready for that kind of commitment right now, but I am truly intrigued (and I have a little bit of a headstart on visiting many things in the US). However, there was one thing in the book I am ready to dive in and try - Jim Sinclair's annual St. Valentine's Day Massacre map navigating contest. It's a contest done by US mail and has been going for more than 40 years. Contestants receive a map in the mail with a complicated list of instructions and an answer sheet with multiple choice options. I'm a little nervous that Jennings was only able to complete half of the map himself (an option that's available to first-timers), but I'm hoping Jaimee will agree to do it with me and we can help each other figure out the answers ;)

There are also chapters on map collectors, geocachers, make-believe map creators, early explorers, the creation and beginning of Google Earth, and the mappers who mark streets on OpenStreetMap. And while the characters in the book are interesting and thoroughly entertaining in their topophilia, what I really loved most about the book was the obsessive way he inserted gobs of obscure trivia into each chapter. If you're going to read the book, (which I highly recommend), don't worry. This is just a small percentage of the trivia in the book, so go ahead and enjoy it. But I just had to share some of this nerdy trivia with all of you. It gave me lots of things to look up on Wikipedia and read about, and I am planning to buy the book myself, if for nothing more than the 16 pages of referenced books, articles and online resources in the back. Here's some of my favorite trivia.

- Weirton, West Virginia is the only town in the US that borders two different states on opposite sides - it's in that tiny little stick we drove through on our trip.

- Victoria Island in Nunavut, Canada is the world's largest "triple island" (an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island). There are others, but this is the biggest.

- Bir Tawil is a little piece of desert between Egypt and Sudan that neither nation can claim because of some strange international treaty, making it one of the last little pieces of land on Earth that belongs to no one at all.

- The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress has 8,500 cases of maps with 5 drawers each, nearly two entire football fields worth, including maps hand-drawn by Stonewall Jackson, Magellan, Lewis and Clark, and George Washington.

- The USGS began creating a series of topographic maps just after WWII in 1:24,000 detail (each mile is 3"). They didn't finish the project until 1992, and the map is so big that if you pulled out the blank blue maps of the Great Salt Lake it would be 783 feet by 383 feet (about 3 city blocks).

- When the Defense Department came to the Library of Congress after September 11th for a map of Afghanistan they could use, the Library had one because it had purchased it the year before in the equivalent of a garage sale that a vault in Arizona held while trying to clear out items they didn't want anymore.

- You can get a Reader ID (library card for the Library of Congress) and look at maps in the Reading Room (you can't check them out, though). <This is definitely on my list of things to do!>

- New Moore Island in the Bay of Bengal was a hotly disputed piece of land between India and Bangladesh, until it disappeared under the water due to rising sea levels.

- But the island of Ferdinandea (a submerged volcano) occasionally rises out of the Mediterranean and then subsides or erodes again. It last surfaced in 1831, where it was swarmed by tourists and argued over by diplomats before it went under again. The US accidentally bombed the island in 1986, thinking it was a Libyan submarine. Oops.

- Censored or altered maps still exist today. For example, while Google Earth shows a US military area on the Korean Peninsula clearly, the most popular South Korean site (Naver) had covered the area with a barren wilderness, literally erasing everything in the area.

- President Eisenhower made the cross-country trip I did in 1919 (he was an army officer then), heading to California to visit family, except he did it without paved roads in many areas. It took him 62 days (an average speed of 6 mph) and the convoy lost nine vehicles and 21 men were injured in the 230 accidents on the trip. In 1956, when he was President, he signed the Interstate Highway System into law, "the greatest peacetime public works project in history", using enough cement to build 80 Hoover Dams. Thanks, Eisenhower!

- Rand McNally predated Google StreetView Maps by about 100 years. When the company first started in 1907, they didn't have maps, but had a series of "Photo-Auto Guides", which were dashboard photos with a driver's eye view of landmarks and intersections and little arrows that showed where to turn. Roads weren't consistently numbered or labeled, so drivers had to use landmarks to get around.

- It was actually Rand McNally that initiated the labeling of our roads and highways shortly thereafter. Instead of figuring out how to get more photos, they changed everything. They created a numbering system and decided to drive all over the country, labeling every single road and route by hand. By 1922, they had labeled 50,000 miles of roads. Luckily for them, state and federal agencies pitched in with their own efforts to get the job done.

- Some geocaches are so extreme, they've never been found, although I think the one left by a Russian Mir submersible at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is cheating, considering people have actually been able to retrieve the one that was dropped by helicopter on top of a 70' tall pylon in the middle of the Potomac River in West Virginia, as well as the one at the bottom of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. There is also an unclaimed geocache on one of the highest peaks of the Nepalese Himalayas, if you're interested.

- Because land is so hotly debated, Google is constantly involved in diplomatic issues, negotiating with governments and sending its own representatives to the UN committee on place-names. This diplomacy has caused them to make concessions, such as making the border of a particular country appear different to viewers from each of the two countries - actually moving the borderline to that particular country's believed area to avoid conflict.

- Google has added a Street View snowmobile for snow trails, a tricycle for narrow roads, a trolley for indoor imagery (like museums), and a Trekker (like a backpack) for areas only accessible by foot (first used in the Grand Canyon).

- Many things have been discovered on aerial photos like Google Earth that no one had seen before. Examples include the ruins of a lost Amazonian city in Parma, and the 'forest swastika' - a group of trees planted in Brandenburg that make a visible swastika during a few weeks of spring and autumn when the leaves turn yellow. The trees were cut down in 2000. Or how about the fact that a team of German scientists discovered in 2008 that grazing cattle orient themselves almost entirely north to south, prompting further studies on animals and their sensitivity to magnetic fields. 

- Google Maps and Google Earth both list the West Lancashire town of Argleton. A place that does not exist in real life.

- The current marker of the Four Corners - where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet - is actually 1,807 feet east of the real place where the four states connect.

- Tired of geocaches? Maybe you should hunt for convergence lines (where latitude and longitude meet - a perfect 0,0,0). From any point on Earth, you are never more than 49 miles from one of these spots - even closer together the nearer you get to the poles (although many are underwater). Want to see photos of these completely uninteresting places? Visit the Degree Confluence Project, maintained by convergence hunters seeking all of these points on the earth. There's still some that haven't been visited.

- Want to do something even weirder? Join the group who is trying to make a 'sandwich' of the Earth. It's nearly impossible in the US, because we don't have many antipodes (an-tip-uh-deez), or diametrically opposite points (on the other side of the world) that isn't water, and that would make the bread soggy. All you have to do is find two points that are on the opposite side of the world, find someone on the other side of the Earth who is willing to lay a piece of bread on the ground, and voila! an Earth sandwich! (two brothers  laid half a baguette on the hills of Southern Spain while someone else did in Auckland, New Zealand to make the first deliberate Earth sandwich in 2006, although I suppose it's possible one was accidentally made before that.)

Find your antipodes