Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [4]
It’s been this way for centuries. That wooden map puzzle that took my map virginity when I was three? Those date back to the 1760s, when they were called “dissected maps” and were wildly popular toys, the ancestors of all modern jigsaw puzzles. For Victorian children, the most common first map was a page in a family or school Bible, since a map of the Holy Land was often the only color plate in a vast sea of “begat“s and “behold“s. Nothing like a dry two-hour sermon on the Book of Lamentations to make a simple relief map look suddenly fascinating by comparison! That single page probably drew more youthful study than the rest of the Good Book put together—Samuel Beckett makes a joke in Waiting for Godot about how his two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, have never read the Gospels but remember very clearly that the Dead Sea in their Bible maps was a “very pretty . . . pale blue.” Joseph Hooker, the great British botanist, once wrote to his close friend Charles Darwin that his first exposure to maps had been a Sunday school “map of the world before the flood” that he said he spent hours of his “tenderest years” studying. That one map led to his lifelong interest in exploration and science, during which he helped Darwin develop the theory of evolution.
In the twentieth century, when kids were spending less time in front of Bibles, the inevitable map on their schoolroom wall served the same purpose: something to stare at when a dull monologue on fractions or Johnny Tremain started to turn into the wordless “wah-wah” drone of the teacher from a Peanuts TV special. I just now realized why I know all the Australian state capitals, in fact: my desk in second grade was right next to the bulletin board that had the world map on it. My head was just inches from Darwin and Adelaide and, um, Hobart. (See? I still got it.) If I’d been a little taller then, I might be an expert on Indonesia or Japan today instead.
Recently I was driving my friend Todd to the airport, and, while talking about his vacation plans, he outed himself as a bit of a geography nerd. (I’d known Todd for years, incidentally, but was only now finding out we had this in common. Map people sometimes live for years in the closet, cartophilia apparently being one of the last remaining loves that dare not speak their names.) He boasted that, thanks to the hours of his childhood he’d spent poring over atlases, he could still rattle off the names of every world capital, so that’s how we spent the rest of the drive. We both discovered that the capitals we stumbled over weren’t the obscure ones (Bujumbura, Burundi! Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago!) but rather major European cities like Bratislava, Slovakia, and Kiev, Ukraine. Why? Because these cities had committed the crime of becoming national capitals after the end of the Cold War, when Todd and I weren’t map-memorizing nine-year-olds anymore! Apparently our knowledge of geography is like your grandparents’ knowledge of personal computers: it ends in 1987.
I suspect that Todd and I are far from alone in this—that many people’s hunger for maps (mappetite?) peaks in childhood. In part, this is due to the fact that nobody is ever as obsessed about anything as a crazed seven-year-old is; this week I’m sure my son, Dylan, thinks about dinosaurs more than any adult paleontologist ever. Next week it’ll probably be spaceships or Venus flytraps or sports cars.
But there does seem to be something about maps that makes them specifically irresistible to children. Consider: most square, old-timey hobbies are taken up in middle age as a way to mortify one’s teenage children. That’s when Dad suddenly