I NEVER LEFT THE FOLD
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on one of the latest trends in the portions of the world that flatter themselves with the sobriquet “developed.” Paper maps are making a big comeback. The article is cleverly titled “A Return to the Fold.”
Some tidbits from it: Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency of Great Britain, reports skyrocketing sales of custom-made paper maps – an increase of 144% in 2020, and another jump of 23% in 2021. AAA’s map production leapt 123% between 2021 and 2022. A map shop, creatively named The Map Shop, in Charlotte, NC, reports annual growth in sales of 20-30% over the past few years.
It doesn’t seem to be the case that people are abandoning GPS as much as they are adding the joys of map-perusing to their driving and orienteering habits. The most arresting stat from the article: in 2022 the retailer United Tires discovered that in the twenty U.S. cities with the heaviest concentration of cars per capita, 93% of drivers depend on GPS; they are constantly being directed by Australian Karen, the ubiquitous voice of Google Maps.
I’m not; but then again, I don’t live in any of those cities. When I visit one of them – assuming Seattle has to be on the list – I don’t use GPS. Neither of our cars has GPS, and I have never learned to use the massively popular navigation function on a cell phone. Apparently, when I drive into Seattle, I join the 7% weirdo population. Nothing new there.
Using a traditional map may be no less a virtual experience than following Australian Karen’s disembodied echo through the maze of streets in a strange city, but it’s a form of virtuality I prefer for reasons other than the comforts of simple habit. The unfolded map makes me feel grounded; and my trek through new terrain – any new terrain, no matter how urban or rural – makes me feel like I’m ground-truthing a place to learn something for myself. Ground-truthing: in this case, matching a graphic representation to actual earth-terrain. With an ordinary map, I feel like I’m in three-dimensional space. With GPS I feel like I’m nowhere.
It was Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American scientist and philosopher, who crystallized the idea, “the map is not the territory.” He was commenting on the tendency to confuse conceptual models of reality with reality itself. The sentence Korzybski actually wrote, in a 1931 paper titled “A Non-Aristotelian System and Its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics,” was this: “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” I do quite love the thrust of what Korzybski was saying, but the thing that arrests me most is the idea that a map resembles in structure the terrain it represents. What might that mean?
Many years ago, I met a petroleum geologist whose first job out of grad school at the University of New Mexico, c. 1940, was with the United States Geological Survey. He was a strapping young blade back then – a strong and able hiker – and he was hired onto the crews who were mapping back country areas in the Rockies and other mountain ranges. U.S.G.S. produced the now-familiar 7.5-minute topographical maps of often exceedingly challenging terrain. My geologist friend, a man of my parents’ generation, told me that somewhere in the high country of New Mexico he and his partner camped for a night in an elk bedding area, and both came down with tick-borne Rocky Mountain spotted fever. He very nearly died, and his partner did. That fact gave me the heebie-jeebies, but the kind of maps those people created offered me years of pleasure – still do – and when I gaze at one of those USGS topo maps today, I am always astonished at the skill it took to create them – the ability to use 40-foot contour lines to make an accurate representation of some tiny swatch of the earth’s jumbled crust. Certainly they stand among the finest maps ever made. If you learn to read them, you come to see the things they represent in three dimensions. It’s like Magic Eye: something hidden in the landscape – in this case, elevational terrain – pops out at you, and in some strange sense, you “enter” that landscape. Korzybski: “it has a similar structure to the territory.”
Australian Karen, bless her heart, can’t do that. She can’t help you think your way into an actual place. There is no deeper layer to her bland instructions. She can only direct you over the surface. For me, the same is true for Google Earth Maps. Yes, actual photographs taken from satellites! But to me, cold and lifeless – devoid of the interpretive artistry found in the very human hand of a skilled cartographer. I find those satellite maps repulsive. I’d rather be killed by ticks than to use any of them.
The difference lies in participation. Even the most a-topographical two-dimensional map of a city center allows me a sense of entry. I have to do the orienteering for myself. I start with the four directions (every sane culture has always considered them sacred), find my “You Are Here” point of origination, take my bearings, and begin thinking my way around. The tricky diagonal streets, the looping boulevards, the easy landmarks like parks or fountains, the discovery of meridian avenues. Paris by GPS cannot be Paris.
Oddly, my favorite maps also locate me in time. That’s because every good map is also an artifact of its moment. Among my substantial collection of highway maps, my favorite is a Texaco Touring Map of Colorado, copyright 1957 by the H.M. Gousha Company, Chicago, IL. It’s a work of art – gorgeous, endearing, and challenging in its detail. Denver’s population is listed at 415,786; Fort Collins, home of my alma mater, 14,937. My father gave me that map when I came of driving age; he also gave me a Phillips 66 credit card and encouraged me use both of them on my tours from Denver over the Divide and on down the Western Slope. He wanted me to know where I lived. Ground-truthing. Every time I dip into that old map, torn along every seam now, just as I am, my eye travels with memory to the tiny settlement of Gypsum, pop. 345 then, where I had my first flat tire. A ‘63 Rambler American coupe, metallic green, with red terry cloth seat covers we ordered from Warshawsky and Co. I-70 did not yet exist; I had my flat along the old 2-lane U.S. 6 & 24, and fixed it, ironically, on the gravel apron of a defunct Texaco gas station. The map was ten years old then; I was 16. I fixed the flat myself – it’s a frightsome task, lifting a car up on a jack for the first time. Much later I read Thoreau: “Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.”
Sorry, Karen. I’m gonna fumble with this thing on my own.
Copyright © Don Snow, 2023