Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (27 page)

The patron saint of these highway watchdogs is Richard Ankrom, an artist fed up with the confusing interchange between the Pasadena Freeway and I-5 near his downtown Los Angeles home. Instead of waiting for the state to replace the unhelpful overhead sign, he conceived of an art installation he called “
Guerrilla Public Service
,” to be performed before an audience of 140,000 motorists every day. Ankrom crafted a perfect replica of a regulation California Department of Transportation directional marker and I-5 shield marker, and, early one morning in 2001, he armed himself with an orange vest and hard hat, some safety cones, and a fake invoice in case he was challenged. Twenty minutes later, the “art” was successfully installed on the sign—so seamlessly that nobody even noticed the fix for nine months. When a free weekly paper finally broke the news, Caltrans roundly condemned the project as vandalism but, unable to argue with progress, left the homemade sign in place for the next eight years, where it helped millions of Angelenos and tourists navigate downtown successfully. In 2009, Caltrans finally replaced Ankrom’s sign with an official one—but the new one still incorporates Ankrom’s improved design.
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A time-lapse view of Ankrom setting up his “installation”

“Where are we now?” I ask. We’re driving down a rather dreary commercial strip between Tacoma and neighboring Lakewood, and, though I’m trying to think like a roadgeek, I can’t possibly see why this particular road is on our itinerary.

“This is the old U.S. 99,” says Mark in unusually reverent tones. The West Coast’s Route 66 (only upside-down!), Highway 99 once ran from the Canadian border all the way to Mexico, but it was decommissioned in 1968 when I-5 was completed, and much of it is now anonymous and unsigned. Roadgeeks are archaeologists as well, finding history in the modern urban ruins. They see the ghosts of Esso stations and motels shaped like tepees where now there’s only a waste-land of pawnshops and adult video stores.

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 in exhaustive detail, as if it were a model railroad landscape or miniature Christmas village in a shop window. In his book
Notes on a Small Island,
the American travel writer Bill Bryson remembers sitting down on a stone bench while hiking in the Dorset hills and pulling out a map to get his bearings.

Coming from a country
where mapmakers tend to exclude any landscape feature smaller than, say, Pike’s Peak, I am constantly impressed by the richness of detail on the Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 series. They include every wrinkle and divot of the landscape, every barn, milestone, wind pump and tumulus. They distinguish between sand pits and gravel pits and between power lines strung from pylons and power lines strung from poles. This one even included the stone seat on which I sat now. It astounds me to be able to look at a map and know to the square meter where my buttocks are deployed.

The immensity of the New World landscape, with its postcard-ready canyons and cataracts and mesas, has bred a different kind of map
love. Not all of its footpaths have been thoroughly trod by centuries of apple-cheeked old men with plus fours and walking sticks. There’s still the illusion, at least, that there’s too much to see, that the land dwarfs our puny attempts at cataloguing it. You can see that difference when you compare American road maps with, say, Michelin maps of Europe, which are still full of beautiful details that drivers couldn’t care less about: relief lines, railroads, hiking trails, forests, wetlands. The difference is one of heritage. British and European road maps are descended from generations of topographical walking and cycling maps. Americans, on the other hand, adopted road atlases only after they’d adopted the automobile—which was quickly. Because of the vastness of the distances to be covered, cars suited us to a (Model) T.

In fact, our roads changed to suit the maps, not the other way around. Map historians love to claim that the decisions of cartographers can have drastic real-life effects on the territories mapped—
Weimar-era maps
that emphasized all the territory Germany lost in the Treaty of Versailles may have led to Hitler’s rise to power and the Second World War, for example—but the tangled feedback of cause and effect in such cases makes it hard to point to a single smoking-gun map. Not so in the case of the American highway system as we know it, which was largely dreamed up in one fell swoop by Rand McNally & Co.

Rand McNally dove into the automobile navigation business in 1907, but not with maps. Instead it acquired a competitor’s line of “Photo-Auto Guides,” which displayed a driver’s-eye view of landmarks and intersections along popular routes, just like a roadgeek’s dashboard photos. Arrows overlaid on the road showed drivers exactly where to turn, anticipating Google’s popular Street View tool by almost one hundred years. The Chicago-to-Milwaukee photos were actually taken from the front of Andrew McNally II’s Packard,
as he and his new bride
drove north for their honeymoon. These photo books were a practicality, not a novelty, back then; in fact, they were more useful than maps. That’s because there was still no consistent, widely used system identifying American roads. Rand McNally had to tell drivers “Turn left at the red barn” instead of “Turn left at Highway
15,” because Highway 15 probably wasn’t numbered and it certainly wasn’t marked.
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The map firm held an in-house contest seeking a solution to the mapping problem, and a draftsman named John Garrett Brink proposed
a jaw-droppingly bold
solution: the mountain would have to come to McNally. Instead of figuring out better ways of drawing America’s messy tangle of roads on a map, Brink thought, the company should unilaterally designate a system of routes across the country and choose symbols and numbers for them. Then Rand McNally teams would drive across the country, relabeling
every single route
by painting colored stripes and highway logos on telephone poles, like Indian scouts marking pioneer trails across the Old West. In fact, Rand McNally called the work of these early Richard Ankroms its “Blazed Trail” program. By 1922, a fifty-thousand-mile network of numbered, well-marked highways stretched across the country, and state and federal agencies began to follow suit with their own numbering schemes. The modern American road atlas was born, and so was its free cousin, the oil-company road map.
Eight billion
of these gas-station maps were printed between 1913 and 1986, the biggest promotional giveaway of the twentieth century.

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.