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By Root 825 0

gets obsessed with Dixieland jazz or bird-watching or brewing lager in the basement. Not so with map love, which you catch either during your Kool-Aid years or not at all. In fact, I remember my map ardor abruptly cooling around puberty—you discover pretty quickly that it’s not a hit with girls to know the names of all the Netherlands Antilles. In college, I briefly had a pleasant-but-bookish Canadian roommate named Sheldon. (Note: Nerdy first name not fictionalized for this story!) Sheldon moved into the apartment first that September and had the whole place—living room, kitchen, bedrooms—papered with dozens of National Geographic maps by the time the rest of us arrived. I rolled my eyes and resigned myself to the fact that we were never going to see a single girl inside the apartment. But in third grade, I’m sure I would have been over the moon at this development, making Sheldon pinky-swear to be my BFF and drawing detailed maps of Costa Rica on the back of his Trapper Keeper.

See, in elementary school, I was convinced that I was the only one in the world who felt like this. None of my friends, I was sure, ran home to their atlases after school. In the years since then, I’ve become vaguely aware that this, whatever it is, is a thing that exists: that some fraction of humanity loves geography with a strange intensity. I’ll see a three-year-old on Oprah who can point out every country on a world map and think, hey, that was me. I’ll read about a member of the Extra Miler Club who has visited all 3,141 counties in the United States or about an antique map of the Battle of Yorktown selling at auction for a million dollars. And I’ll wonder: where does this come from? It’s easy to see from my own life story, my Portrait of the Autist as a Young Man, that these mapheads are my tribe, but I’m mystified by our shared tribal culture and religion. Why did maps mean—why do they still mean, I guess—so much to me? Maps are just a way of organizing information, after all—not normally the kind of thing that spawns obsessive fandom. I’ve never heard anyone profess any particular love for the Dewey Decimal System. I’ve never met a pie-chart geek. I suppose indexes are good at what they do, but do they inspire devotion?

There must be something innate about maps, about this one specific way of picturing our world and our relation to it, that charms us, calls to us, won’t let us look anywhere else in the room if there’s a map on the wall. I want to get to the bottom of what that is. I see it as a chance to explore one of the last remaining “blank spaces” available to us amateur geographers and cartographers: the mystery of what makes our consuming map obsession tick. I will go there.

Chapter 2

BEARING

n.: the situation or horizontal direction of one

point with respect to the compass

An individual is not distinct from his place. He is his place.

—GABRIEL MARCEL

James Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is bored in his geography classes—all those place-names in America seem so far away to him. But when the places are his, his native surroundings, he has no trouble with their names. This is what he writes on the flyleaf of his geography textbook:

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

As a child, I liked to write my address using a similar hierarchy—though I was apparently more of a space geek than wee Stephen, so my address featured a few steps (“The Solar System, Orion Arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Virgo Supercluster”) that he skipped. I’m sure my elaborate envelope-addressing system annoyed the mailman, but it delighted me. One of the fundamental questions of childhood is “Where am I?” and children want to know the answer on every level, from the microlocal to the galactic.

“What was it that identified us as closet geographers, perhaps as children, long before we knew enough to put a name on our private passions?” Peirce Lewis, then the president of the Association of American Geographers, asked in a 1985 address. The “visceral love of maps”