What you’ll need: a location to map out, an artistic sensibility

Songlist: Maps by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs

Further reading: Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky, Maphead by Ken Jennings (yes, THE Ken Jennings, aka Jeopardy millionaire)

Back during World Traveler week I was going to dedicate one post to maps. But then I started looking at maps and I remembered how much I frigging love maps. They deserve more than one day.

I don’t have a lot of experience in map-making. Sure, there were the occasional elementary school projects for which I had to create an economic map of Africa or label a map of the United States with the 32 American football teams (much like the baseball map above). And sure, I once created a map of a fictional town, about which I was going to write a YA series. But nothing like professional cartography.

A highway map of Wyoming

Maps astound me. When we were driving back from Wyoming to Minnesota a few weeks ago, I was constantly checking our atlas for the small towns we passed (an atlas that is so well-loved and well-travelled that both the Wyoming and Minnesota pages have fallen out). Yes, there were Wyoming’s descriptive towns Sundance and Tensleep, and there were South Dakota’s rather more unpleasant sounding Murdo and Pukwana. And every town was placed exactly in proportion to the next–a fact that I once took for granted but now amazes me. How do cartographers do it?

It’s not so much the technology that amazes me–GPS, lasers, and computers can make short work of a landscape–but the idea of every place on earth being documented. I remember hearing about the goal of Google’s Street View, which is, ultimately, to provide images from every street in the world (although not all countries yet have planned visits from Google’s Camera Cars). I immediately thought of the Borges-like short story possibilities: what if a single person decided to walk down every street in the world?

What I love most, though, is that for every map out there there is a person for whom it is unnecessary. Which is to say, every street in the world is known well by at least a small group of people. While we can feel proud of being familiar with the famous streets of the world–knowing, for instance the expanse of the Champs-Élysées or 5th Avenue gives one a certain cachet–isn’t it our unique knowledge that sets us apart? When we are able to associate memories and intimacies with the smallest names on a map, those maps come alive.