Let your mind wander good directions
What maps say about us and why a real one beats GPS
Ilove maps. And at home, I keep all sorts of them around — road maps, topographic maps, world maps, antique maps, park maps and more.
They are on my walls. They’re on my bookshelves. They’re in atlases, calendars, albums, file folders, and random piles all around the house. They show me where I am, where I’ve been, and where I’d like to go, as well as places I would never want to venture.
Whenever I travel somewhere special, I make sure to pick up a high-quality map of that place and then, as often asnot, frame it as a keepsake.
Some of my maps show the same locations, but at differenttimes. For example, I have an assortment of Pittsburgh maps ranging from 1795 to the present day. They show lots of changes. As a boy, I used to collect state road maps from gas stations. And I have maps that show what was known of the world to ancient cartographers — maps that include far-away topographic features which could only have been imagined, along with their fanciful and sometimes fearsome inhabitants.
The first map I remember having was a world map that my parents hung in my bedroom. Each country had its own color and name — names which in many cases had changed after World War II. Some of them were the colonies of European powers. Some were identified with names mispronounced by the leaders of faraway imperial nations. Others were pictured with boundary lines which have since been moved. And some countries that appeared no longer exist as sovereign states.
Beyond that, the map in my room was drawn using Mercator’s projection. It was a flat, two-dimensional representation of the entire Earth. That kind of map offered an important advantage over globes, which required constant turning in order to see different parts of the world. But it suffered several importantdrawbacks.
One was distortion. The farther away from the equator a land mass appeared, the greater its apparent size. So Greenland, for example, appears to be bigger than either Africa or South America, although it is only onefifth their size. And Antarctica seemed to spread across the entire globe.
The other drawback was that it showed the world in a very parochial way. The United States appeared right at the center, with the split between the map’s eastern and western ends severing Asia rather than, as is customary these days, dividing the world at the Bearing Strait, so as to keep land masses intact.
As I later learned, the maps used in many other parts of the world also display their home countries right at the map’s center. So cartographic provincialism wasn’t unique to us. However, my parents also had a globe, and that made a world of difference. Here’s why:
When I was 12, my family traveled to Germany for a few months on an exchange program. Although we traveled both ways by ship, commercial air service was by then starting to connect Europe with the U.S. So my father showed me the route that we would follow by boat as distinct from the way an airplane would travel.
When he plotted them on my wall map, it seemed as though the air route, which followed an arc way up to the north, was significantly longer than the ship route. But then he used a string on the globeto show me the distance that the two methods would actually involve. And it turned out that the northern air route was significantly shorter than it appeared on the flat map. So it was easy to see the value of depicting the worldas a sphere.
However, what I like most of all about maps is that they show things the eye cannot see. Things like boundary lines, mineral resource deposits, ethnographic settlements, weather patterns, crop growth, transit routes, or any number of things that really matter but can’t be seen by the naked eye.
The oldest map I have is a reproduction of a 6th-century mosaic showing Jerusalem and surrounding areas of the Holy Land. Other antique maps of the same region show images of Crusaders, religious symbols, wild animals, and physical features which didn’t even exist in Jerusalem at that time.
More recently, I’ve owned cars equipped with GPS. It’s a mapping technology that I find very helpful — particularly when driving through unfamiliar areas. But their on-screen displays are limited to a few hundred, or a few thousand, feet from wherever you happen to be. They don’t show where you are with respect to major landmarks, and they are limited to showing only those things that a driver can visually identify while en route.
GPS, as wonderful as it is, simply can’t compare with the world of insight and imagination that printed maps can capture. So, while digital maps are definitely useful, the world of printed maps can be truly mind-altering.