Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [52]
I’m sure we all like to think that we carry within us whole worlds that our fellow humans never glimpse, but few of these worlds, I’m guessing, come complete with their own plum liqueurs and nineteenth-century immigration laws. It’s easy to write off the Wrights as a family of dreamy eccentrics, but many people invent their own countries and draw maps of rugged coastlines that never were; we call these people “children.” The Wrights were unusual only in that they kept summer homes in their childish kingdoms through adulthood.
Some of the most famous pieces of “unreal estate” in literary history were, after all, inspired by children’s maps. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, with its famous treasure map, would never have been written if not for Stevenson’s young stepson Lloyd, who passed a rainy summer painting watercolor maps with his stepfather in their Scottish cottage. The place-names they hand-lettered onto the map, like “Skeleton Island” and “Spyglass Hill,” inspired the events of the story.* And when J. M. Barrie dreamed up Peter Pan’s home isle of Neverland, he purposefully imitated the cartography of children:
I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.
When I was in the third grade, my friend Gerald and I were kings of twin monarchies called Oofer and Uffer. (I am now seeing those names written down for the first time in twenty-five years.) I can still picture the maps we drew: Oofer is in orange crayon, Uffer green, and a long narrow strait of cerulean sea separates them, running from east to west. But why did we draw the maps? I haven’t the foggiest notion. In hopes of refreshing my memory, I pay a visit to Benjamin Salman, a Seattle eighth-grader who is, I imagine, what Austin Tappan Wright must have been like at fourteen.
Like Wright, Benjamin is the offspring of gifted parents: his father, Mark, is a concert pianist, and his mother, Sarah, is, quite literally, a rocket scientist. (She used to be an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she worked on the Voyager probes; now she teaches math at a nearby university.) Their living room is a pleasantly cluttered space full of antique furniture, musical instruments, stacks of books and National Geographics, and papier-mâché masks hung on the walls. Benjamin is crouched on the wooden floor in front of me, spreading out a grid of eighteen sheets of typing paper.
“This is Augusta, one of the largest cities in Alambia,” he tells me. “It is a complete, exhaustive map.” It’s a Thomas Guide of the imagination, with thousands of nonexistent streets, parks, and businesses meticulously laid out and labeled. “But this one”—he begins spreading out a map of his entire continent—“will never be finished.”
Benjamin’s own Islandia is actually a modified version of the real-world continent of Australia, moved northward and tilted at a rakish 30-degree angle, “for geographic diversity,” he explains in his offhand, slightly elevated way of talking. He’s sitting on the sofa now with his knees around his chin, occasionally chewing on a knuckle. “The actual contents—the geography, the history, the people—they’re all completely different.” When Benjamin talks about