Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [102]
This is no Psycho Urban Cache #13, but by my standards, at least, it’s pretty extreme. There’s no trail up the steep slope south of the falls; instead, some thoughtful local has left a system of tree-anchored ropes to help visitors up the more vertical sections. I make it up the 430-foot zigzag with much huffing and puffing but no life-threatening scrapes, and I count the stair steps of roaring water as I pass them: six, seven, eight. By the time I finally make it to the ninth cascade, where the cache is hidden, my arms and legs are sore. That’s what I came for, I tell myself—after all, you can’t spell “geocaching” without “aching”! Here I locate the ammo box without any trouble, as expected: the cache is listed as a five-star climb but only a two-star hide. A means, not an end.
I walk to the rocky edge of the ninth waterfall and look across the valley to the Cascades on the other side. It’s everything the Discount Tire parking lot was not: grandiose, inspiring, entirely free of used prophylactics. I feel a moment of kinship with Dave Ulmer, the grandfather of geocaching. He still sends me near-daily e-mails full of nutty Ayn Rand quotes and gorgeous photos of sunsets and cacti, and it’s comforting to know that he’s still wandering the West somewhere like David Carradine in Kung Fu, following his GPS receiver to ghost towns and cliff dwellings and abandoned gold mines. GPS buffs often use the acronym POI to refer to the “points of interest” to which the technology has taken them. In fact, I think, geocaching makes the whole planet into one big POI—a richer, more compelling place to live.
Standing on the edge of the cliff, I unfold my printout listing nearby geocaches. I still have a few more hours of daylight; I could probably find eight or nine roadside caches on the drive home. Or I could keep following this trail up past the geocache; apparently there’s a tenth waterfall and then ropes down to the punch-bowl valley on the other side. It won’t pad my count, but then again, that’s not really the point, is it? I put the paper back into my pocket, slip on my gloves, and continue up the side of the mountain.
Chapter 11
FRONTIER
n.: a line of division between two countries
Our age today is doing things of which antiquity did not dream . . .
a new globe has been given to us by the navigators of our time.
—JEAN FERNEL, 1530
In Lewis Carroll’s final novel, Sylvie and Bruno, a mysterious traveler called “Mein Herr” tells the two titular children that his faraway world has advanced the science of mapmaking well beyond our puny limits. He scoffs at the idea that the most detailed map available should be six inches to the mile. On his world, he boasts, “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” But, he has to admit, this ultimate map has never even been spread out, because the farmers protested that it would block their crops’ sunlight due to its amazing size.
Carroll’s notion of a map exactly the size of its territory, in perfect one-to-one detail, inspired Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “On Exactitude in Science” and was further explored by Umberto Eco in a remarkably thorough 1982 essay. Eco straight-facedly enumerated the logistical problems that such a map would entail: the armies of men required to fold it, for example. He ponders making it transparent, to address the objections of Carroll’s farmers, but realizes that any markings on the map would have to be opaque, thereby blocking some local sunlight, which could affect the ecology of the territory beneath. And if it did, the map would then become incorrect!
Obviously, Carroll, Borges, and Eco weren’t proposing such a map as a serious cartographic innovation.* Their giant maps are whimsical thought experiments on the tricky relationships