Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [120]
“Are you almost done with your map book?” he asks sleepily.
He asks this a lot, but out of pure self-interest, not cartophilia. “The map book” is always the reason I give when I can’t play with him every waking hour. You want me to wear a ninja mask while you shoot suction-cup-tipped Nerf bullets at my forehead? Sorry, map book.
“Actually, I’m almost done,” I say. “Today I was trying to figure out which parts of the book should actually have maps to illustrate them.”
“You can put my map in your book if you want. I drew it today.”
“Really? You drew a map? Let me see.”
The map—the first map—is sitting in a pile of books at the head of his bed, just where I used to keep my Medallion World Atlas. “This is the Sea of Sharks,” he says. “You have to follow this dotted line through the sharks and the octopuses and jellyfish to get to the X-marks-the-spot.”
“What’s at the X?”
This is apparently the silliest question anyone has ever asked. “That’s the treasure!” He yawns. “Tomorrow I’m going to make a map of my submarine. Will you put it in your book?”
“We’ll see. Good night, kiddo.”
“Good night, Dad.”
Maybe the map gene lives after all. I walk downstairs smiling, and Dylan, I can only assume, drifts off to explore the Sea of Sharks.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: ECCENTRICITY
1 “My wound is geography”: Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides (New York: Dial, 1986), p. 1.
2 “Weirton, West Virginia”: Located at the narrowest part of West Virginia’s pointy little panhandle part, Weirton extends from the Ohio border in the west all the way to Pennsylvania on the east—even though the town is only five miles wide.
3 “Now when I was a little chap”: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Norton, 1902/2005), p. 7.
4 Karen Keller: Cindy Rodriguez, “Population: 1,” The Boston Globe, Apr. 19, 2001.
6 folding his keffiyeh: Said K. Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (New York: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 82.
7 a stretched leopard skin: Stephanie Meece, “A Bird’s Eye View—of a Leopard’s Spots,” Anatolian Studies 56 (2006), pp. 1–16.
8 evolved gradually over millennia: Angus Stocking, “The World’s Oldest Map,” The American Surveyor, June 2006.
9 ancestors of all modern jigsaw puzzles: Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), p. 111.
9 “very pretty . . . pale blue”: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954), p. 5.
9 “map of the world”: Letter to Charles Darwin, Feb. 1, 1846. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1844–1846 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 283.
13 “An individual is not”: Quoted in Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), p. 43.
13 Stephen Dedalus: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Norton, 1916/2007), p. 13.
14 asked in a 1985 address: Peirce Lewis, “Beyond Description,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75, no. 4 (December 1985), pp. 465–477.
14 geographer Yi-Fu Tuan: Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (New York: Prentice Hall, 1974).
14 no less than W. H. Auden: Introduction to John Betjeman, Slick but Not Streamlined (New York: Doubleday, 1947), p. 11.
16 “That map set”: Quoted in Gianni Granzotto, Christopher Columbus (New York: Doubleday, 1985), p. 57.
16 “He did not doubt”: Quoted in Henry Vignaud, Toscanelli and Columbus (London: Sands, 1902), p. 220.
17 A famous 2000 study: Eleanor A. Maguire et al., “Navigation-related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 8 (April 11, 2000), pp. 4398–4403.
18 grokking diagonals: Barbara Tversky, “Distortions in Memory for Maps,” Cognitive Psychology 13 (1981), pp. 407–433.
18 Harm de Blij has claimed: Harm de Blij, Why Geography Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 27.
19 one researcher noted: Most of these findings about children and maps come from Lynn S. Liben’s work at Penn State. A good summary is her