Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings Page A

Columbus thought he was in India; Vespucci realized that a new continent had been found. By the same token, Rodger had probably passed those ferns on the way to his garage many times, but it was the Degree Confluence Project that “discovered” what they meant. That’s what maps are for: they provide the story of our locations and translocations. A $500 GPS device can tell you your position, but a $10 road atlas is still an infinitely more powerful tool for providing context.
    The Degree Confluence Project isn’t the reductio ad absurdum of our new constant awareness of latitude and longitude. That honor would belong to the “Earth sandwich” dreamed up in May 2006 by the Web humorist Ze Frank. In a short video, Frank instructed his fans to place two pieces of bread on the ground at diametrically oppositepoints, or antipodes, * on the Earth’s surface, making the Earth, in effect, into a giant if inedible sandwich. He even broke out a tender “Imagine”-style ballad to commemorate his brainstorm. “As I lay this bread on the ground, I know my job ain’t done,” he crooned, “but if the Earth were a sandwich, we would all be one. (Sandwich.)” Frank’s challenge was harder than you might think: looking at an antipodal map of the Earth’s surface reveals that almost every bit of land on the planet sits directly opposite a large body of water—almost as if the God of your choice always intended the sandwich version of His creation to remain open-faced! One of the few possible sandwich sites is the Iberian Peninsula: if you were to dig a hole straight through the center of the Earth from Spain, you’d reemerge somewhere in the northern half of the island nation of New Zealand. Just weeks after Frank’s challenge was posted, two Canadian brothers named Jonathan and Duncan Rawlinson, traveling from London to Portugal, made a side trip into the hills of southern Spain to lay a half baguette on the dusty ground, while an Internet co-conspirator did the same thing near his home in Auckland, New Zealand. The first Earth sandwich in human history had been completed.

    The Earth, overlaid with its antipodal version. Very few spots are sandwich-friendly in both hemispheres.
    It’s easy to dismiss the Earth sandwich as a silly (if ambitious) prank, the kind of conceptual art that the Liverpool cult band Echo & the Bunnymen practiced in the 1980s, when they would include odd locales like the Outer Hebrides of Scotland on their tour itineraries, so that the tour would form the shape of a rabbit’s ears when seen on a map. * But as I reflect on the map freaks I’ve met on my journey, one of the things they all share is this same urge: to make the Earth—the entire Earth, its meridians and parallels and antipodes—into a giant plaything. Systematic travelers use jet planes and geocachers use GPS satellites and Google Earth fans use 3D-rendered aerial photography, but the impulse is the same one that’s led people to pore over atlases for centuries: the need to place our little lives in the context of the Earth as a whole, to visualize them in the context of a grander scale. To this day, when we outline some ambitious plan, we still speak of how it will put us “on the map.” We crave that wider glory and perspective.
    We also crave exploration, and that’s a thrill that’s become scarcer as technology has advanced. When Alexander the Great saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. Well, actually, I don’t know if he did or not. That’s a quote from Alan Rickman’s German terrorist character in Die Hard . But the sentiment, at least, is true enough: human ambition requires new frontiers to cross, and for the last millennium, most of those frontiers were geographic in nature. In 1872, a surveyor named Almon Thompson explored the high desert plateaus of south-central Utah, mappinga tributary of the Colorado called Potato Creek, which he renamed the Escalante River, and a