Free Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings Page B

Just a block east from the sports fields, I realize, is the western terminus of Interstate 90. I remember once driving past that on-ramp with my son, Dylan, after a ball game. “If you got on that highway there,” I told him, “the road wouldn’t end until you got all the way to Boston Harbor. It stretches all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.”
    Dylan was transfixed by the idea and begged to drive to Boston that very night . (It was getting kind of late, so we just got ice cream instead.) I remember having my mind blown by the same notion as a kid, that all roads were essentially connected and that our driveway was the start of a continuous river of asphalt and Portland cement that might end at Disneyland or the Florida Keys or Tierra del Fuego. Today I can’t see the same mental picture without wincing at some ofthe uglier results of America’s century of road and automobile culture: suburban sprawl, rush-hour traffic, air pollution, those bumper stickers where Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes pees on the Chevy logo. But as a child, my romance with the roads in my atlases and stretching out from my front door was unclouded by any real-life complications. They were only space and potential.
    The size of America makes our national fascination with maps different from cartophilia in other parts of the world—Britain, for instance. As you might expect from a nation so geeky that it once put the Daleks from Doctor Who on a postage stamp, the British are second to none in their love of maps, and their government Ordnance Survey’s “Explorer” maps, with their iconic orange covers, still sell in the millions every year . But there is something cozy and fiddly about map love across the pond. The British take pride in creating scaled-down versions of the countryside in exhaustive detail, as if it were a model railroad landscape or miniature Christmas village in a shop window. In his book Notes on a Small Island, the American travel writer Bill Bryson remembers sitting down on a stone bench while hiking in the Dorset hills and pulling out a map to get his bearings.
Coming from a country where mapmakers tend to exclude any landscape feature smaller than, say, Pike’s Peak, I am constantly impressed by the richness of detail on the Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 series. They include every wrinkle and divot of the landscape, every barn, milestone, wind pump and tumulus. They distinguish between sand pits and gravel pits and between power lines strung from pylons and power lines strung from poles. This one even included the stone seat on which I sat now. It astounds me to be able to look at a map and know to the square meter where my buttocks are deployed.
    The immensity of the New World landscape, with its postcard-ready canyons and cataracts and mesas, has bred a different kind of maplove. Not all of its footpaths have been thoroughly trod by centuries of apple-cheeked old men with plus fours and walking sticks. There’s still the illusion, at least, that there’s too much to see, that the land dwarfs our puny attempts at cataloguing it. You can see that difference when you compare American road maps with, say, Michelin maps of Europe, which are still full of beautiful details that drivers couldn’t care less about: relief lines, railroads, hiking trails, forests, wetlands. The difference is one of heritage. British and European road maps are descended from generations of topographical walking and cycling maps. Americans, on the other hand, adopted road atlases only after they’d adopted the automobile—which was quickly. Because of the vastness of the distances to be covered, cars suited us to a (Model) T.
    In fact, our roads changed to suit the maps, not the other way around. Map historians love to claim that the decisions of cartographers can have drastic real-life effects on the territories mapped— Weimar-era maps that emphasized all the territory Germany lost in the Treaty of Versailles may have led to