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

thirty-mile mountain range now called the Henry Mountains. Thompson didn’t know it, but his discoveries would be the last river and the last mountain range ever added to the map of the contiguous United States. Before Thompson’s expedition, travelers had referred to the Henry range as “the Unknown Mountains,” and Navajo in the area still call it Dzil Bizhi’ Adini, “the mountain whose name is missing.” But that’s not true anymore: now all is named, all is neatly catalogued, just as the mapmakers thought they wanted. That frontier is gone.
    Of course, the human yen for advancement didn’t end when Conrad’s “blank spaces” on the map were gone. We have turned our attention to “mapping” other things, like outer space and the human genome, but for those of us hardwired to organize the world spatially, cartographically, something is still missing. We’re not content with discovering things that must be fuzzily visualized—quarks and quasars. We wish we could still discover real places, places we could visit, places that could surround us.
    And so we reinvent exploration, albeit on a smaller and less perilous scale. We find ways to make even the most banal places new—by organizing them into made-up checklists, by planting geocaches in the parks there, by photographing the exit signs of the highways running through them, by studying their pixels in unprecedented detail on the Internet. Others forsake tidy modern maps altogether. Some recapture a sense of mystery with antique maps, with their wildly inaccurate coastlines and tentacled monstrosities at the margins. Others wander paths that are still unexplored because they exist only in the imagination. When I was a child, I could always add to a completed map of some fantasy kingdom simply by Scotch-taping a new piece of paper at one edge and continuing to draw. There will be no depressingly final “Potato Creek” on these inexhaustible maps.
    It’s been therapeutic for me to meet so many different kinds of geo-nuts. I can see that their rich diversity of obsessions all seem to be expressions of the very same gene, and it’s the same instinct that mademe an atlas collector at the same time that all my friends were more into He-Man and Knight Rider . But I’ve been most surprised by the response from friends who find out what I’m writing about. Since childhood, I’ve expected people to snort at the idea of maps being a bona fide hobby, so when I say, “It’s a book about people who like maps,” it comes out like an apology. Instead, those turn out to be the magic words that make me a secret confidant, a father confessor.
    Laurie Borman, the editorial director at Rand McNally, said to me, “When I tell people where I work, you wouldn’t believe how many people tell me, ‘Really? I love maps!’ It’s more than you would think. But you can tell they think it’s sort of an embarrassing confession to be a map geek.” That’s exactly what I find from my friends as well—even ones I’ve known for years, ones I’d never expect to be closet map fans.
    “I can kill a whole afternoon just looking at rare maps on dealers’ websites,” says one friend. I knew he worked from home, but I had always naively assumed he was actually getting some work done sometimes. “Just drooling, not buying. It’s like porn in our household.”
    “When my marriage was going south,” says another friend, recently separated from his wife of five years, “I took my collection of National Geographics from when I was a kid and threw them away, like my wife had been telling me to for years. But I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the maps, so I took them out and hid them on top of the bookshelves.” *
    “As a kid, I’d beg my parents for the Thomas Guide every Christmas,” yet another friend tells me, lowering her head and smirking guiltily at the sordid shame of it all.
    The unlikeliest map booster of all turns out to be Mindy’s obstetrician, whom I call