Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [118]
The unlikeliest map booster of all turns out to be Mindy’s obstetrician, whom I call the “monkey doctor,” since, in addition to having delivered my daughter, Caitlin, she also delivers all the gorilla babies at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.† The monkey doctor keeps a world map mounted on the wall of her exam room, because, she says, nothing distracts nervous patients better than a map does. I’m not sure this is the highest bar for map love to clear—“Maps: More Fun Than Thinking About an Imminent Pelvic Exam!” is unlikely to catch on as a geography slogan anytime soon—but the doctor has been surprised by how many patients (“more than you’d expect!”) she finds completely engrossed in the map when she comes in.
Despite all the scare stories about American college students who can’t find Africa on a world map, it seems there is a vast untapped reservoir of goodwill toward geography out there. It goes undercover; it keeps its head down until it knows it’s in friendly company. But those alarmist newspaper articles about map-dumb kids wouldn’t be written at all if, on some level at least, our society didn’t still feel like maps were an important marker of knowledge and culture and interest.
I’m convinced—and relieved—that, as a maphead, I’m not the lonely oddity I always thought I was. But this is even better news for the world at large: people still like maps! Despite the media fear-mongering, our kids still like maps. If they’re failing geography tests en masse, it’s only because we’re letting them down. We’re not teaching geography or spatial literacy the right way or giving them a long enough leash to explore their environments on their own. We’re inadvertently convincing them in a million little ways that maps are old-fashioned and dull and that there’s something a little weird about looking at them for fun.
But no matter what we do, I think maps are destined to win the battle. For five hundred years, maps changed barely at all, so it’s no surprise that our enthusiasm for them has faded a bit. But today we are poised at the brink of a potentially Gutenberg-like sea change for maps. There’s nothing dull about a flight through a three-dimensional Grand Canyon on Google Earth, or a map that shows where all your friends are in real time, or a comprehensive world atlas—down to street-level detail!—that you can carry with you on a cell phone. These technologies are so compelling that they could convert even the most spatially confused map skeptic, the way video games turned thousands of not-otherwise-destined-for-geekdom kids into computer science majors. For the first time in decades, there is reason to think that we might be entering a geographic renaissance. Viva la revolución.
If the geographers and psychologists I’ve talked to are right and map love is just a symptom of a gift for spatial thinking, it makes sense that maps could be passed through families genetically, like curly hair or color blindness. That’s certainly true in my case; my parents liked looking at maps. So did my grandparents, my mom’s parents. The second atlas I ever owned as a kid, after the Hammond atlas I saved up all year for, was a Rand McNally Cosmopolitan World Atlas that my grandma mailed to me in Korea. I can still picture the ballpoint-pen inscription on the title page, in her neat, round handwriting: “Merry Christmas 1983! Atlases are some of our favorite things too! Love, Grandma and Grandpa.” That meant a lot to me at that age, the idea that someone besides me understood—that atlases were, in fact, an acceptable thing for adults to say they liked.
Grandma died of a lung ailment almost ten years ago, shortly after Mindy and I were married. She never got to meet her great-grandkids, and, I realize now, I never got to talk maps with her as a grown-up. My grandpa is still doing as well as one could hope to at eighty-two, and since he lives nearby, we have him over for dinner every Wednesday night.