Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [2]
And then there were those amazing place-names. My hours with maps featured lots of under-my-breath whispering: the names of African rivers (“Lualaba . . . Jumba . . . Limpopo . . . ”) and Andean peaks (“Aconcagua . . . Yerupajá . . . Llullaillaco . . . ”) and Texas counties (“Glasscock . . . Comanche . . . Deaf Smith . . . ”) They were secret passwords to entry into other worlds—more magical, I’m sure, in many cases, than the places themselves. My first atlas listed, in tiny columns of type under each map, the populations for thousands of cities and towns, and I would pore over these lists looking for comically underpopulated places like Scotsguard, Saskatchewan (population: 3), or Hibberts Gore, Maine (population: 1).† I dreamed of one day living in one of these glamorous spots—sure, it would be lonely, but think of the level of celebrity! The lone resident of Hibberts Gore, Maine, gets specifically mentioned in the world atlas ! Well, almost.
The shapes of places were just as transporting for me as their names. Their outlines were full of personality: Alaska was a chubby profile smiling benevolently toward Siberia. Maine was a boxing glove. Burma had a tail like a monkey. I admired roughly rectangular territories like Turkey and Portugal and Puerto Rico, which seemed sturdy and respectable to me, but not more precisely rectangular places like Colorado or Utah, whose geometric perfection made them false, uneasy additions to the national map. I immediately noticed when two areas had slightly similar outlines—Wisconsin and Tanzania, Lake Michigan and Sweden, the island of Lanai and South Carolina—and decided they must be geographic soul mates of some kind. To this day, I see British Columbia on a map and think of it as a more robust, muscular version of California, just as the Canadians there must be more robust, muscular versions of Californians.
Separated at birth
These map shapes had a life of their own for me, divorced from their actual territories. Staring at a map for too long was like repeating a word over and over until all meaning is stripped away. Uruguay ceased to represent an actual nation for me; it was just that shape, that slightly lopsided teardrop. I saw these outlines even after the atlas was closed, afterimages floating in my mind’s eye. The knotty pine paneling in my grandparents’ upstairs bedroom was full of loops and whorls that reminded me of faraway fjords and lagoons. A puddle in a parking lot was Lake Okeechobee or the Black Sea. The first time I saw Mikhail Gorbachev on TV, I remember thinking immediately that his famous birthmark looked just like a map of Thailand.*
By the time I was ten, my beloved Hammond atlas was just one of a whole collection of atlases on my bedroom bookshelf. My parents called them my “atli,” though even at the time I was pretty sure that wasn’t the right plural. Road atlases, historical atlases, pocket atlases. I wish I could say that I surveyed my maps with the keen eye of a scientist, looking at watersheds and deforestation and population density and saying smart-sounding things like “Aha, that must be a subduction zone.” But I don’t think I was that kind of map fan. I wasn’t aware of the ecology and geology and history manifest on maps at first; I was just drawn to their scope, their teensy type, and their orderly gestalt. My dad liked maps too, but he preferred the black British atlas in the living room, a Philip’s one from the 1970s in which the maps were all “hypsometric.” Hypsometric maps are those ones that represent terrain with vivid colors: greens for low elevations, browns and purples for high ones. He liked being able to visualize the physical landforms being mapped, but I preferred the clean political maps that Hammond and