Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [32]
Borders may start out as arbitrary, but they don’t stay that way for long. The British travel writer Mike Parker has noted that the Earth, seen from orbit, is no longer a borderless, utopian “big blue marble”: where nations meet, so do their agendas and policies. From miles above the Earth, you can see the straight line where heavily forested western Russia meets the cow pastures of eastern Finland or where a stretch of Montana grassland meets irrigated strips of farm country in southwest Saskatchewan. The most dramatic example is the heavily militarized “demilitarized zone” between the two Koreas, just a half hour’s drive north of Seoul, where I grew up. By day, the rift in the divided peninsula is almost invisible from space, but by night, the cities of South Korea are brightly lit, while isolated, agrarian North Korea is abruptly dark, as empty as the remotest stretches of Siberia or the Sahara. The distinct line between light and dark looks like a power outage moving across a cityscape grid by grid, except that this blackout has been going on for sixty years. By night, South Korea isn’t a peninsula. It’s an island.
Borders may divide us, but, paradoxically, they’re also the places where we’re nearest to one another. Borders on a map may start out as a useful way to separate Us from Them, but then they become symbols of our own complacency; by their very existence, they dare us to cross them. The breaching of a border doesn’t have to be the result of an invading barbarian horde; when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, it was gleefully sledge-hammered into the past by those on both sides of it. Even Chile and Argentina signed a Tratado de Paz y Amistad (“Treaty of Peace and Friendship”) at the Vatican in 1984, ending the century-long Beagle Channel conflict for good. “We’ll meet on edges soon,” as Bob Dylan once sang.
South Korea’s secret double life: peninsula by day, island by night
John Hébert is also the chairman of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a federal body created in 1890 by President Benjamin Harrison to standardize American place-names. For more than a century, the board has worked to sort out tangles of inconsistency and confusion that can plague even some of the nation’s most prominent spots. Take the Mount McKinley controversy: in 1975, the state of Alaska officially changed the name of North America’s highest point to “Denali,” the native Athabascan name for the peak. But the Board on Geographic Names has been repeatedly stymied in making this change official, thanks to the congressional delegation of Ohio, William McKinley’s home state, which has been introducing anti-“Denali” clauses into appropriations bills for thirty years. Occasionally the board makes blanket changes, as in 1967, when 143 occurrences of America’s direst racial slur were globally replaced on maps with the word “Negro.” (In a similar move, “Jap” later became “Japanese.”) This didn’t solve every uncomfortable map issue, of course. The USGS quadrangle maps are still littered with Dago Springs and Chink Peaks and Polack Lakes, and it’s not as if “Dead Negro Creek” is a huge improvement over the alternative anyway. But the board’s goal is typically historical correctness, whether that aligns with political correctness or not. In 1983, for example, it returned the name “Whorehouse Meadow” to the map of Fish Lake, Oregon, after determining that the limp 1968 replacement, “Naughty Girl Meadow,” was a bowdlerization concocted by embarrassed park officials. Today, says Hébert, the board’s workload consists mostly of hundreds of requests to name things after Ronald Reagan. Between McKinley and Reagan, we’re apparently spending a lot of time and paperwork on the iffy cartographic legacies of two-term Republicans.
As long as I’ve loved maps, I’ve been an enthusiastic