Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (47 page)

Starbucks,
156
–57,
164

Star Trek,
112
,
197

Stevenson, Robert Louis,
108

Stewart, Isaac,
116
–18

Stoppard, Tom,
42

St. Valentine Day’s Massacre (map rally),
177
–85

subways,
136

surveyors

brave and heroic,
88
–89

unpopular and spooky,
63

swastikas, visible from space,
220

Sweden, plotting for world domination by,
136

Sylvie and Bruno
(Carroll),
212
–13

Taal, Lake,
2

Tacoma Narrows Bridge,
172

Tadataka, Ino,
62

Tallis, John,
97
,
104

Tamir, Yuli,
64

Tannen, Deborah,
139

taxi drivers,
17
,
236

Teague, Mike,
188
–89

Terra Australis,
68
,
81
,
83

Tharp, Marie,
74

Theatrum Orbis Terrarium
(Ortelius),
68

theft of maps,
93
–97

Third Culture Kids,
30

Thompson, Almon,
242
–43

Thompson, Nephi,
20

Thorpe, Jim,
69

Today
(show),
34
–35

Tolkien, J. R. R.,
114
–16,
119

toponyms,
4
,
31
,
49
,
67
–74,
219

politically incorrect,
67

risqué,
70
–71

sellout,
69
–70

topophilia,
14
–15,
29
–31,
45

Toscanelli, Paolo,
16

travel, systematic,
11
,
149
–65,
168

cost of,
151
,
162
–63

reasons for,
151
,
153
,
158
,
160
–61,
164
–65

Travelers’ Century Club,
149
–55,
158
,
159
–60

Travellers Club,
149

Treasure Island
(Stevenson),
108

treasure maps,
62
,
248
–
49

Trebek, Alex,
125
–26,
129
,
141
,
143
–45

after a few drinks,
147

civilian wardrobe of,
125
–26

triangulation,
88
–89

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico,
69

Tuan, Yi-Fu,
14

turtles,
21
–23

Ulmer, Dave,
187
–89,
191
,
194
,
201
,
202
–3,
210

United States Geological Survey,
59
,
60
,
234

University of Miami,
32
–36

upside-down maps,
52
–54,
53,
140

Upton, Caite,
38

Useem, Ruth Hill,
30

Utopia
(More),
119

Uttal, David,
17
–20,
24
–25

Vatican Museum,
136

Veley, Charles,
158
–62,
164

Vermeer, Jan,
99
–
100

Vespucci, Amerigo,
75
–77,
90
,
240

Victoria Island, Nunavut,
2

video games,
112

virtual reality,
225
.
See also
augmented reality

Waiting for Godot
(Beckett),
9

Wake Island,
152
,
239

Waldseemüller map,
74
–78,
76

Washington, D.C., navigating layout of,
18
–19

Washington, George,
58
,
82

Washington, Mount,
135

Waugh, Andrew,
89

wayfinding,
16
–25,
51
,
233
.
See also
GPS

Wehner, Rüdiger,
23

Weil, Simone,
31

Weirton, West Virginia,
2

Wheaton, Wil,
193

Wheel of Time, The
(Jordan),
113

Where in the World Is Carmen
Sandiego?,
54

White, Andrew Dickson,
39

Wilder, Billy,
184

Williams, Kenneth,
39

Wilson, Howard,
39
,
41

Wilson, Woodrow,
58

Win, Lose, or Draw,
38

Winter (Starbucks obsessive),
156
–57,
164

World War I,
58
,
175

World War II,
50
,
58
,
59
,
60
,
106
,
169
,
175

Wright, August Tappan,
105
–7

Wright, John Kirtland,
107

Wright, Mary Tappan,
107

Wright, Sylvia,
106

Yang, Eric,
130
,
137
–38,
143
–46

Young, Brigham,
247
–48

Zapatero, José,
37

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^*
This “honor” is sometimes claimed by Vulcan Point, on Lake Taal in the Philippines. But point your Internet map of choice at 69.793° N, 108.241° W—the unnamed Canadian island-in-a-lake-on-an-island-in-a-lake on Victoria Island is much bigger.

^*
My personal favorite has always been Bir Tawil, a tiny trapezoid of desert on the border between Egypt and Sudan that, by international treaty, neither nation can claim. (For complicated reasons dating back to the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement of 1899, both Egypt and Sudan would lose their claim to a much more attractive slice of territory called the Hala’ib Triangle if they were to call dibs on Bir Tawil.) As a result, Bir Tawil is one of the last remaining bits of
terra nullius
—land belonging to no one—on Earth.

^†
There’s a downside to this kind of fame,
The Boston Globe
learned in 2001 when it profiled
Karen Keller
, the lone resident of Hibberts Gore. The Census Bureau doesn’t release demographic information for individuals, but it does release
average
totals for all towns and cities, which means that Keller’s salary, for example, was published as the average household income for Hibberts Gore.

^*
Yassir Arafat once claimed that he spent an hour every day
folding his
keffiyeh
head-dress so that it would resemble a map of his longed-for Palestinian state, showing everyone he met that Palestine was—literally!—always on his mind. I don’t think that the Thai people were always on Gorby’s mind, but that was the impression he may inadvertently have been giving map nerds everywhere.

^*
Hypsometric maps are also out of fashion with many cartographers, who find them misleading. Readers often assume that the hypsometric tints represent vegetation, not elevation. But the most barren desert might be verdant green on one of these maps, if it’s sufficiently low-lying. Conversely, lush highlands might be a lifeless beige.

^*
Part of the reason for the long gaps here is that many early maps, though widely used, haven’t survived to our day. The timeline is spotty and tattered for the same reason that, say, a Honus Wagner baseball card or a copy of
Action Comics
no. 1 is so valuable: because everybody’s mom threw stuff away. Just as mapmaking is a science of omissions—the cartographer can’t include
everything
on the map, no matter how tempting that sounds—so the history of maps is a series of gaps and omissions as well.

^*
The term, however, seems to have been coined almost thirty years before, by
no less than W. H. Auden
, who used it to describe the strong sense of place in the work of his fellow poet John Betjeman.

^*
The costs of losing one’s way in unfamiliar territory were much higher a few centuries ago, when you might be robbed or shipwrecked or eaten by hungry wolves every time you strayed off course. G. Malcolm Lewis has argued that maps were humanity’s way of inoculating itself against that fear of the unknown: by staring at a map of new territory, you were forcing yourself to confront your fear of it via the behavioral therapy that today we would call desensitization.