Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [83]
The last stop on our itinerary is another historic spot: the famed Tacoma Narrows Bridge, recently twinned with a new span heading west to the Kitsap Peninsula. The original bridge across this strait was the famous “Galloping Gertie,” which collapsed in a 1940 storm. If you were ever in an introductory physics class, you’ve probably seen the famous footage of the bridge wobbling and warbling terrifyingly due to harmonic resonance before it crashed into Puget Sound. The new bridge is reassuringly sturdy.
“Being a roadgeek is definitely something the rest of the population doesn’t get,” sighs John Spafford as we turn around and head back toward downtown Tacoma. “It’s not genetic—even my kids don’t have it. I’m a little disappointed.” He prefers vagabond family vacations straight out of his childhood, but his college-aged daughter wants a real vacation like her friends get: a week by the pool in Orlando. “We never stay anyplace more than a night,” he says, shrugging. “She’s tired of seeing cornfields.”
Even if his own kids never learned to enjoy the fabled wonders of roadgeek America—the sixteen-lane stretch of I-285 near the Atlanta airport or the record thirty-six times that I-91 and US-5 cross each other through New England—John has still managed to jump-start a new generation of young roadgeeks. Since leaving the military, he’s taught elementary school, and his fourth graders begin every school day with a little geography exercise, tracing highway routes with dry-erase marker on a state map at the back of his classroom. “By the end of the year,” he boasts, “my sharp ones can tell highways just by the shape of the shield. ‘Aha, this is U.S. 12!’ “
Mark, on the other hand, has landed the roadgeek’s dream job: he works for the Washington State Department of Transportation, in charge of the state’s official highway map. Back in Tacoma, we say good-bye as he drops me and John off by our respective cars. The last I see of him as he pulls away is the personalized license plate on the back of his Ford Taurus: “MAPPER,” with a surround that reads, “I’m not lost / I’m a cartographer.”
Driving home to Seattle, I pass the stadiums where the Seahawks play football and the lowly Mariners play something not entirely unlike baseball. Just a block east from the sports fields, I realize, is the western terminus of Interstate 90. I remember once driving past that on-ramp with my son, Dylan, after a ball game. “If you got on that highway there,” I told him, “the road wouldn’t end until you got all the way to Boston Harbor. It stretches all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.”
Dylan was transfixed by the idea and begged to drive to Boston that very night. (It was getting kind of late, so we just got ice cream instead.) I remember having my mind blown by the same notion as a kid, that all roads were essentially connected and that our driveway was the start of a continuous river of asphalt and Portland cement that might end at Disneyland or the Florida Keys or Tierra del Fuego. Today I can’t see the same mental picture without wincing at some of the uglier results of America’s century of road and automobile culture: suburban sprawl, rush-hour traffic, air pollution, those bumper stickers where Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes pees on the Chevy logo. But as a child, my romance with the roads in my atlases and stretching out from my front door was unclouded by any real-life complications. They were only space and potential.
The size of America makes our national fascination with maps different from cartophilia in other parts of the world—Britain, for instance. As you might expect from a nation so geeky that it once put the Daleks from Doctor Who on a postage stamp, the British are second to none in their love of maps, and their government Ordnance Survey’s “Explorer” maps, with their iconic orange covers, still sell in the millions every year. But there is something cozy and fiddly about map love across the pond. The British take pride in creating scaled-down versions of the countryside