Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [85]
The road atlas has become inseparably tied to that uniquely American ritual of liberation: the road trip. When I think about driving a route across town, I picture the actual landmarks involved, but when I plan a trip any longer than an hour, my mental imagery is plucked straight from Rand McNally. In my mind’s eye, highways aren’t black striped with yellow. They’re bright blue ribbons with red borders, stretching across a landscape white with absence: literally the open road. National forests are mottled blobs constructed, if I think hard enough about it, not out of trees but out of a lime-green cerebral cortex of tiny, winding convolutions. There are trees too, of course: one evergreen apiece in every state park, right next to a little green triangular tent.
In fact, road atlases have become such a Pavlovian bit of shorthand for travel and independence that some mapheads can satisfy their wanderlust without ever leaving home, just by opening a Rand McNally road atlas. Meet the participants in Jim Sinclair’s annual St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, a contest by mail that he’s held every February for more than forty years. They travel a circuitous course across America from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Statue of Liberty (or the reverse route in odd-numbered years) all without ever leaving their armchairs or kitchen tables. The journey is made entirely on maps.
The Massacre (like Jim’s other yearly map events, the Circum-global Trophy Dash and the Independence Day Fireworks) was born out of the faddish road rallies held in the mid-1960s by clubs like the Chicago-based Concours Plains Rallye Team, of which Jim was a member. These sports car buffs weren’t racing for speed, as they do at Monte Carlo. In these “TSD” (time-speed-distance) rallies, teams navigated a complicated set of driving directions on public roads at preset speeds, with the aim of passing a series of checkpoints at the precise seconds required. During the long midwestern winters, when icy roads left the drivers housebound, someone suggested a map-based version of a road rally, and in 1964 the first Massacre was held. Jim took the event over in 1968 and in 1980 quit his chemical engineering job to run the contests full-time.
Just as it was then, Massacre HQ is still the Sinclairs’ sixties-era rambler just north of Pasadena. It’s a rainy, misty day in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains when Jim and his wife, Sue, invite me inside to what I can immediately see is a grandparents’ house straight out of central casting: public radio classical music playing quietly somewhere, shelves lined with Garrison Keillor and Agatha Christie hardcovers, grandkid photos on every flat surface. The only difference is Jim’s home office, which has metastasized to cover the whole living room. The pool table is now piled deep with boxes, envelopes, and stacks of reference books. “We have paper boxes for end tables now,” sighs Sue, who sits across from us on the plaid sofa, near her quilting basket.
“I liken the Massacre to skiing, in that when somebody tries it, they’ll either get it right away and like it, or they’ll say, ‘What’s this for?’” says Jim. He’s a serious, professorial-looking man in his late sixties with white whiskers and a deep, gruff voice. “I’ve given up feeling that anybody would like it, because I know that most people don’t have that kind of mind.”
I know that Jim means that not just anybody can get into his contests, but you could be forgiven for wondering if he meant that not anybody is capable of understanding them. See, map rallying is a strange and byzantine pursuit,