Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [79]
“They’re very serious about it.”
“I know they are, and I don’t care. I wish them well. I’m concerned about their motivation, but I hope they’re happy. If they’re happy, that’s great.”
“What’s the danger?”
“The danger is relying on external reward, because there isn’t any.” He’s right. Winter has explained his Starbucks count by saying, “I want everyone in the world to know my name,” but his eccentric quest will never make him genuinely famous. When The Guinness Book of World Records dropped its “Most Traveled Person” record, Charles Veley lamented that “It was like finishing a marathon only to discover that all the officials had gone home . . . very frustrating.”
“And he spent a million dollars on it,” marvels Chris, sighing. Chris has spent a tiny fraction of that on his own adventure, proving his point that almost anyone can travel, and extensively—it’s just a matter of how badly you want to.
The checklist may drive the addiction, but for most of these globetrotters, the journey quickly becomes its own reward. Early in his travels, Charles let his yen for efficiency get the better of him, making token stops in countries just so he could cross them off. Now he can’t wait to go back and really see them: Bulgaria, Iran, Honduras, Tunisia. “There is no finish line,” he says. It’s not about completion anymore.
And highpointers know that their collection isn’t about the climb so much as it is getting off the beaten path. “It’s a vehicle that takes you places you never would have thought about going to,” Craig Noland says. “Have you ever been to Kenton, Oklahoma?” Oddly enough, I haven’t. He explains that it’s the panhandle town nearest to Black Mesa, the Sooner State’s highest point. “You can go there and see dinosaur tracks and the country’s longest mesa. There’s a three-state border that’s changed places five different times. You can see the wagon ruts from the old Santa Fe Trail. It’s the only town in Oklahoma that’s in the Mountain Time Zone. You can spend the whole day there, in the middle of nowhere! But you’d never say, ‘Hey, let’s go to Kenton and check it out.’ “
I don’t really have a list of my own, though I admire those who do. I respect finishers, people who won’t settle for doing most of something. I like knowing that tens of thousands of compulsive travelers are crisscrossing the globe right now, elevating the most mundane of human endeavors—getting from one place to another—into a kind of performance art.
As recently as a century ago, people who wanted to see the entire world knew that could never happen, so they would sit with atlases and idly daydream of the places they saw mapped there. In our age of casual travel, it surprises us to remember that no sitting U.S. president ever left the country until 1906, when Teddy Roosevelt wanted to find out how the Panama Canal was coming along. For the first time in history, jet-age transportation has put essentially the entire Earth within the reach of these insatiable travelers. They can now dispense with the atlas, having visited every single one of its pages. They’ve become the atlas.
And in at least one case, they’ve literally become the territory as well. In 2002, Jack Longacre, the founder of the Highpointers Club, learned that he had terminal cancer. “I want to be on the mountains,” he told friends as he prepared his will. “That’s where I belong.” So he collected film canisters, labeled them with the names of the fifty states, and distributed them to club members. When he died nine months later, they honored his last wish by scattering his ashes on the United States Geographic Survey markers atop all fifty high points, the peaks and the trailer parks, the mesas and the rest stops, every single one. One final checklist.
Chapter 9
TRANSIT
n.: a piece of surveying equipment used by mapmakers:
a theodolite with a reversible telescope
There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention