Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [6]
The word “topophilia,” from the Greek for “love of place,” was popularized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in a 1974 book.* When I first read about the concept, I experienced a jolt of recognition and validation, like a patient finally getting the right diagnosis for an obscure malady. I had felt this weirdly intense connection to landscape my whole life, but it was a relief to finally have a fancy Greek name to hang on it. Lewis said he had been forged into a geographer by the white sand dunes on the shores of Lake Michigan where he used to spend his summers as a child. My own primeval landscape was the Pacific Northwest, where I was raised: the lush pastures of my grandparents’ farm in Oregon’s Willamette River Valley, and especially the drizzly cedar-and-fir forests of western Washington State, so thick with moss and ferns that even in winter the forest floor is a vivid shade of green you normally see only in children’s books about dinosaurs. If you hooked me up to one of those hospital monitors, I imagine the graph of my heartbeat would look exactly like the pale contour of the Olympic Mountains seen across Puget Sound on a sunny day. Well, no, not really. That would be charming but probably fatal.
Young topophiles are most deeply shaped by the environments where they first became aware they had an environment: they imprint, like barnyard fowl. Baby ducks will follow the first moving object they see in the first few hours after they hatch. If it’s their mother, great; if it’s not, they become the ducklings you see following pigs or tractors around the farm on hilarious Sunday-morning news pieces. When I was seven years old, my family moved from Seattle to Seoul, Korea; I’ve since lived all over the globe, from Singapore to Spain to Salt Lake City. (The alliteration has been a coincidence, not an itinerary.) These are all places with distinctive, beautiful landscapes, ranging from tropical jungles to Mars-like salt flats, and I happily explored them all, but it was too late for me. I had already imprinted on a different part of the world. Falling in love with places is just like falling in love with people: it can happen more than once, but never quite like your first time.
These early landscapes are the maps over which my mind wanders even while I’m asleep. I rarely dream about the office cubicle where I worked for years or the house I live in now. My dreams are far more likely to be set in more primal settings: my grandparents’ sunlit kitchen, the hallways of my elementary school. And geography is an unusually vivid element in my dreams. Upon waking, I rarely remember the dream people I met or the jumble of events that took place, but I always have a very strong sense for where I stood, which direction I was traveling. Years later, I can still remember dreams that took place in nonexistent neighborhoods of major cities—Seattle, San Francisco, New York. Within those dreams, I always navigated with a very specific idea of where I was on a city map, and always, of course, with the dreamer’s absolute certainty that I had been there many times before.
Not everyone thinks this way, of course. We all have our own filing systems. A history buff might mentally index things chronologically. (“Let’s see, that must have been the summer of ’84, because the Colts were already in Indianapolis but The Cosby Show hadn’t premiered yet . . . ”) The quiz buffs I met when I was playing Jeopardy! excel at trivia because of strong associative memories; they are naturally gifted at storing new facts, and retrieving them, by topic. Some new factoid about, say, peanuts will stick in their mental mesh because it gets linked to clusters of thematically similar data, facts about circuses and Jimmy Carter and peanut butter, which in turn links to Annette Funicello and George Washington Carver, and so on.
But some of us organize the world by location.