Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [80]
—JOHN STEINBECK
I t’s a spectacularly beautiful day for a drive in the Pacific Northwest. Mount Rainier looms above the blue waters of Commencement Bay so big and clear that it looks like a special effect. Behind it tower summer banks of golden cumulus clouds straight out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. But the two men I’m driving with seem oblivious to nature’s wonders. They’re interested in a different kind of scenery.
“That bridge we just crossed was built in 1928. It was widened ten years ago, but the plaque there is still stamped with the original date,” says Mark Bozanich, who is behind the wheel. He’s a slow, thoughtful talker with a slightly scraggly white beard, the prerogative of the wise old geek in virtually any field. “And that bridge we’re going under now still has the old Milwaukee Railroad logo, did you see that?”
John Spafford, in the passenger seat, is a somewhat younger guy with frosted blond hair, still clipped as short as it must have been during his eight-year career in army intelligence. He’s been explaining the snarled traffic caused by a state route that essentially dead-ends to our southeast. “There’s a missing link between Tacoma and the 167, the Valley Freeway. It comes down into Puyallup, and now you’re connecting with the 512 that’ll take you south to I-5, but there are plans to expand it all the way up to the port!” Visions of a six-lane limited-access bypass from Tacoma all the way north to the Seattle suburbs dance in John’s eyes.
Mark and John are self-confessed “roadgeeks,” as these amateur highway scholars prefer to call themselves.* Just as Britain’s oft-ridiculed “trainspotters” have made a science of ticking off locomotive numbers in little notebooks, so have roadgeeks appointed themselves the guardians of America’s road network, from its mighty interstates to its tiniest country lanes. They can tell the difference between a Westinghouse streetlight and a GE one and are the only ones who notice when the lettering on interstate signage is switched over from Highway Gothic to the new Clearview font. (Hint: Look for the curved tail on the lowercase “l”!) They follow road construction projects with a regularity and fervor that others might reserve for a favorite soap opera or sports team. They know why there’s one I-76 in southern Pennsylvania and another one in northeastern Colorado,† and how to interpret West Virginia’s odd, fractionally numbered county routes.‡
Scratch a roadgeek, and you’ll find a maphead; virtually all their stories begin with a road atlas, scrutinized for long hours during one of the endless driving vacations of childhood. Mark grew up carefully tallying the traffic signals on Highway 99 between Seattle and his grandparents’ house in Portland every summer and still has a voluminous collection of old gas station maps. John inherited his family’s navigator position at the tender age of nine, when a road atlas got thrown at him in the backseat after Mom misread the map once too often. For years, a buff like Mark or John would study the highways with the sad conviction that he was the only person in the world so fascinated with cloverleafs and control cities.* The phenomenon didn’t get a name until the dawn of the Internet, when these lonely “roads scholars” were surprised to discover thousands of like-minded enthusiasts all over the world. “Great,” Mark’s daughter likes to tell him. “All fifty people that are interested in highways can now find each other.”
Even better, the Internet gave roadgeeks a place to “publish” their work. Photography is a huge part of roadgeek travel; when test-driving a new car, the dedicated buff will always check to see how a camera would fit up front, the better to take dashboard photos of every mileage sign and junction of their future expeditions. Buffs might feel a little silly keeping thousands of these snapshots in shoe boxes under their bed, but