Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [114]
Despite my long history with paper maps, I wind up convinced by Minster’s optimism: there will be nothing to lament when some new platform eventually replaces them, since that new technology, whatever it is, will by definition have to do all the things that paper maps do well. It will have to be portable and immediately intuitive. It will have to accommodate readers who need a specific piece of information now, as well as those just browsing for pleasure. And it will have to be a broader canvas than just a set of driving directions—not just how to get from A to B but a whole alphabet through Z of nearby suggestions and digressions. Maybe a few old-timers like me will always be annoying our grandkids with tales of how awesome maps used to be when they smelled like ink and crinkled like wood pulp, but, more likely than not, these will be stories of the walking-uphill-in-the-snow-to-school variety. “You kids today don’t know how good you have it with your holographic globes that rotate by scanning your retinas! I had to do my homework with maps on paper—no, really, paper!—and they were unwieldy and hard to find stuff on and they were obsolete the moment they were printed. I’m telling you, it took character to be a map nerd back then!”
And—who knows?—maybe paper maps will be sticking around longer than we think. I rode in a cab twice during my visit to Chicago: once from the airport out to Rand McNally headquarters in Skokie and then from Skokie to my hotel. Both cabdrivers were enslaved to a dashboard GPS that told them exactly where to turn at every moment. Yet somehow we still managed to get lost along the way. Both times.
Chapter 12
RELIEF
n.: differences in elevation on the Earth’s surface,
as represented on a map by contours or shading
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. ELIOT
My cell phone rings as I’m sitting with some friends, waiting for a concert to start. “Ken, this is Rodger. You left a message for me last week?”
“Right! Rodger! Thanks for calling me back. Your neighbor Kathy gave me your number. I hope that’s okay.” I take a deep breath, because what I’m about to say next is deeply weird. “Did you know that there’s an integer degree confluence at the end of your driveway?”
A long pause. “There’s a what in my driveway?”
The Degree Confluence Project was started in 1996 by a Massachusetts Web programmer named Alex Jarrett, a new GPS owner who noticed that his commute happened to take him across the nearby seventy-second meridian twice a day. The mathematical perfection of that line of longitude—seventy-two degrees west, no minutes, no seconds—sang to him like a row of zeroes on a rolling-over odometer. He and a friend biked ten miles to get to the point where the seventy-second meridian crossed their closest parallel, forty-three degrees north. The intersection turned out to be a nondescript spot of snowy woods next to a swamp. “We kept expecting there to be a monument at any location saying ‘43N/72W’ but no such luck,” Alex wrote on his website, where he posted pictures of the momentous expedition.
If you think about it, that very lack of a monument was what turned “confluence hunting” into a popular pastime, first for Jarrett and his friends and family and then for thousands of geography geeks who stumbled across his project on the Internet. There’s no National Geodetic Survey benchmark in the ground to identify these integer confluences, and that means nobody’s ever found them before. There are 16,340 “confluence points” worldwide,* and each one represents a chance to plant a flag like the explorers of old. Confluence hunters have dutifully braved army ants in the jungles of Ghana, leeches in Malaysian swamps, and armed nomads in