Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [88]
“Dy-lan!” I bellow, in full-on Dave-from-the-Chipmunks mode.
“Wow,” says Mindy. “This is just like being on a real car trip with Dad!”
Thus ends my ill-advised attempt to try a thirty-hour map exercise with two small children. Perhaps, like John Spafford, I’m doomed to be the last map geek in my own gene pool. I grouchily scoop up my road atlas and my grievances and head off to my office to continue my virtual road trip in silence.
For the next few weeks, I doggedly spend an hour or so every night on the Massacre. (Now I know what it massacres: your free time.) My kids learn to leave me alone when I’m hunched over the road atlas muttering things like “Go left on 191, then go right on unpaved road when you see ‘191’ in Wyoming” and moving my finger slowly across the paper as if all the highways were Braille. It turns out that, despite my fascination with maps of all kinds, I am really, phenomenally bad at map rallying. At one point during the second week, I find myself in west Texas when I can infer from the directions that I’m still supposed to be in Colorado. When I finally figure out where I went wrong and get back to the Rockies, it takes me a full hour to inch my way from Cañon City, Colorado, to nearby Pueblo. That’s longer than it would take me to actually drive those forty miles.
I begin to secretly hope the whole thing will turn out to be a prank, like those elementary school tests in instruction-following that begin with “Read all the instructions before beginning,” then march you down a list of pointless, labyrinthine directions only to end with something like “Ignore all the previous steps. Leave your page blank except for your name at the top, and hand it in.” But as the days stretch into weeks and I wind my way through Kansas and Nebraska, my hopes dim. So does my vision. Every time I go back to recheck my answers, I somehow wind up following the same deterministic instructions onto different highways entirely. Theoretical physicists take note: the Massacre instructions appear to occupy some kind of nexus of quantum-level uncertainty. Schrödinger’s Road Trip.
On a road trip, when you start to lose it, you should pull over for the night. Jim allows rookies like me to mail in answers after completing only four of the Massacre’s eight legs, and in the end that’s what I do. Stranded in South Dakota, doomed never to “see” the Statue of Liberty at the finish line, I admit defeat and mail in my answer sheet.
Three weeks later, I get an e-mail from “the Old Maltese,” letting me know that I finished in first place! Well, I finished first among first-time contestants who, like me, wimped out halfway. All six of them. Still, my final score of sixteen isn’t bad—that’s sixteen missed questions out of forty-eight. As in golf, the lowest score wins. Bart Bramley is one of six entrants this year with a perfect score of zero, handing him his fifth Massacre win. Maybe the LASIK will have to wait one more year.
When the complete answer sheet arrives in the mail, I notice with a groan that one of my sixteen goofs was the very first Massacre question: do you see Berkeley or San Francisco first driving east across the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge? How did we manage to blow that one? Reopening the atlas, I see my mistake. In my careful perusal of the teensiest map text, I’d managed to miss a much bigger feature: San Francisco County, stretching almost all the way across the bay.
I should have listened to Edgar Allan Poe. Way back in 1844, in his classic mystery story “The Purloined Letter,” Poe has his detective, Dupin, say the following:
There is a game of puzzles which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word—the name of a town, river, state or empire—any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects