My employers and their shipping and receiving crew laugh at my insistence on using street atlases and road maps rather than GPS or Siri to find our new customers all over New England. For all I know, they may be the same thing, Siri the voice of GPS.

Away from work, too.  Older folk find it quaint.  Middle-agers, including my daughter and son-in-law, think me obstinate.  Younger folk simply cannot believe it; either I’m putting on an act, or I’m just plain stupid.

When the technology availed itself, I began explaining that I didn’t want routes chosen for me, that I wanted to see the curves and angles, the alternate routes, the names of two or three streets before any turn, and landmarks.  I certainly did not want to make myself dependent on an electronic device.

I usually spit out that last item with emphasis verging on contempt, not for anyone who asked, but for the suggestion.  Call it my way of telling them to never ask the question again. Older and middle-aged folk shrug and oblige.  Younger folk say, “OK Boomer!” and let it pass.

My love of maps began when I was younger than they.  I bet I was no more than ten when, at my grandmother’s house, I found a book with a title something like American History Illustrated which included dozens of maps from Colonial times through the addition of New Mexico and Arizona as the 47th and 48th states in 1912.  Its geography was already out of date.

The photos were inspiring, at times provocative (Who would ever argue with Wilson?), and the editorial cartoons were entertaining, at times surprising (How could anyone not like Lincoln?), but the maps were most fascinating.  When I made a list of page numbers so that I could view them one after another, in sequence from Colonial times through territorial purchases, admission of states, the Mexican War, Gold Rush, Indian treaties, and yes, Manifest Destiny, I saw American history as if it was film.

Noticing that I always pulled it from her shelf, my grandmother told me to take the book home where my father took note.  At the time my parents and I made road trips every summer to see her sister and family–six cousins–in Ohio.  Dad put me in charge of the road maps.

At first, I did little more than tell him how far we had to go to the next rest area or town for the sake of a restaurant or “filling station,” as we called them, but by the second year he would ask me to pick out a US or state highway–usually along the legendary Erie Canal–for a bit more scenery, a break from the endless thump-thump-thump of the New York Thruway.

One year I navigated a side trip to Cooperstown, New York, to see the Baseball Hall of Fame, another to Skaneateles, NY, to meet five more cousins, another to Youngstown, Ohio, for yet another seven. Perhaps because we were the only small family it was up to us to drop in on them.  And no doubt that finding ten of those twelve cousins to be girls was a reward for my cartographic skills.

Worth noting here that road trips were relatively new to the American experience in the Fifties.  An idea commissioned by President Eisenhower who didn’t take office until 1953, interstates did not exist, unless you count a the few existing state toll roads in the Northeast later designated as such.  And it might have taken as long to develop items such as tires and shock absorbers to allow for the long distance drives that automakers were urging us to take:

In high school and college I had little occasion to use maps except for a few drives from Salem, Mass. to the anti-war demonstrations in Washington DC, and neither I nor any passenger was interested in any side excursions. But in my senior year, I took a Geology course to satisfy a requirement that most liberal arts majors took in sophomore year.

Having already read so much the literature set in the West–Twain, Steinbeck, Cather, Norris, London, Garland, etc.–may be why I took such acute interest in how the land was formed. A few weeks in, it wasn’t just a subject I studied, but one I would talk about with anyone who would listen. When it was over, I was so sure of it, that I didn’t cram for the final, and showed up with a novel I had long intended to read but kept putting off, a rage of my generation. Before the prof arrived with the blue books, among a few dozen students cramming with their texts and notebooks, I sat with my nose in a paperback.

So engrossed that I didn’t notice his arrival, or his passing out the books until he was right in front of me. I closed the book, but before I could put it down, he grabbed it to see the title and laughed:

“Is this your way of giving me the finger?”

“It’s my way to relax. I liked this class. I want this test. I’m going to ace it.”

Another laugh: “I’m sure you will.”

We were both right. As for the “finger” comment, I still wonder if it was for bringing a novel to a Geology final, or for the novel I brought: The Catcher in the Rye.

I did it again in grad school at South Dakota State, or something like it. As a graduate assistant in the English Dept., I took a Cartography course as an elective. Already working on a thesis on regional writers on the 19th Century known for local color and dialect, I wanted maps to illustrate the settings. The English Dept. chair and a few of the tenured higher-ups were not pleased.

Anyone who has taught or worked in higher education knows that territorialism rears its ugly head at such things, but as a grad-ass (yes, that was the word we used) I had yet to learn that I was expected to stay on the reservation. Turned out that Cartography 101 was the last class I took, and by the next semester, when I was safely back in Massachusetts, they had a new rule that restricted their grad-asses’ choice of electives.

Given the subject matter, you could call it a case of Territorialism vs. Territory.

Apparently the results on five pages of my thesis had nothing to do with their verdict. To this day, I take The Forgotten Realist (my thesis bound as a book) off my shelf to show visitors four of the maps–one of Indiana, another of the Ohio Valley, one the old Northwest territory, another of the mid-Atlantic states. The names of writers and their novels on each.

The fifth map? Well, let’s just say that my renditions of mountain ranges looked more like preschool than grad school. Not only that, but it was placed facing into the center of the book, rather than out, making it doubly ridiculous. Probably my mistake. Still quite proud of the four, I’ve often wondered if I missed my calling.

At the time, and I would think to this day, SDSU’s Geography Dept. was reputable enough to make it a pipeline for graduates to a federal agency in St. Louis that prepared maps for the departments of Defense, Interior, and others.

We all have our what-ifs, maybes, and might-have-beens, and mine range from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh right out of high school to the University of Texas El Paso for grad school to a hippy commune near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, for who knows what, and to Hamburg, Germany, where street-music seemed viable during ten November days, suggesting it would be lucrative in most other months. St. Louis is the only what-if I still ponder that would have been a career.

At SDSU the Cartography lab was my favorite indoor spot. The light table reminded me of the lay-out table for the student newspaper back at Salem State. You could render exact every detail no matter how small, and there is a sensation about creating such things or representing them on a piece of paper–or, as it would be today, on a screen.

Also, it was the first place I ever saw the world on a Robinson Projection, a map that curves the two poles inward and keeps the Equator centered. This lessens exaggerated land sizes near the North Pole, while erasing the subtle reduction of Africa and South America (to inflate Europe and North America) which are inherent in the standard Mercator Projections that we always see.

May not work on this screen or in an atlas on your coffee table, but on the wall of that lab, stretched to about three by five feet, it is akin to seeing the bluffs of the Mississippi River or the Dakota Badlands for the first time. It changes the way you think about land and water.

In 1980, my parents drove to South Dakota for a visit–taking US 14 rather than I-90 across Minnesota at my suggestion to see, among other things, the Glockenspiel Bell Tower and the Historical Museum in New Ulm. The Cartography lab was on the must-see list. At 60 and 55, their awe at seeing that map matched mine.

Since I made numerous trips between the Dakotas and New England, I took various routes. Minnesota’s map became the proverbial palm of my hand, and once, where state highway 23 veers northeast from US 14, I let my hands decide which trip I was to take.

When travelling east, Minnesota is where you must decide if you are going to take an interstate express south of the Great Lakes, a more relaxed ride across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and through Ontario’s Southwest Peninsula, or a wild ride to include a pilgrimage to the home of Bob Dylan up through Minnesota’s Iron Range and across the entire Ontario Province.

On those last two you would later decide to return to the US below or above Lake Ontario–through Niagara and Buffalo across New York, or straight down from Montreal into Vermont. I saw them all, and my daughter saw most of them when she took my old job working the maps.

Much of Rachel’s assignment was to find the small towns likely to have a public swimming pool where we could spend the hottest hours of summer days, me napping, her romping with local kids under the watchful eyes of kind, young mothers. Before all departures along the way, we’d consult the maps and agree on our next moves, all of it step by step, nothing a day in advance, which allowed us to discover unknown and unlikely sites, such as the Painted Rocks in Michigan, a ghost town in Nebraska, a lava field in Idaho, the wrought iron art-work in the center of Madison, Indiana, the wrought iron crosses in a Saskatchewan cemetery.

Serendipity became our one-word motto.

And it was the unspoken rule of my last western road trip with a friend in his 1976 VW bus from Seattle to Minneapolis in 2003. Taking the mountainous routes to enjoy the Cascades–and one meteor shower in a pitch black sky–we landed in Idaho well above I-94. Not wanting to drive due south and take a right turn due east, we checked the map and found Montana 200, among the thinnest of Rand McNally‘s lines, to take us on a diagonal direct to Missoula. Seeing the stream alongside making its way to the headwaters of the Missouri, we knew that it would be all downhill and gradual, giving the VW a reprieve from all the climbing and steep descents.

Would Siri have offered Montana 200 as a possible route? And, if so, would it–she?–have informed us of the stream and the gradual descent?

Today, in a year that few people are going anywhere, I’ve no occasion to consult maps other than to check names and spellings for what I write. Indeed, the only two events in 2020 for me have been two marathon readings of Moby-Dick–a real one in New Bedford in January before shut-down, and a virtual one this summer.

These caused me to re-read the book, start to finish, and for the first time I realized that, in addition to a narration that ranges from calm to skittish, from jolly to reverent, from whimsical to combative, what makes Ishmael so listenable, so rich, is his penchant for using geographic names for comparisons and illustrations, from the “austere Atlantic” to the “contemplative Pacific.”

His description of Nantucket, for example, tells us that so little grows there naturally, “that they import Canada thistles,… that bits of wood… are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome,” and that the islanders wear shoes, “something like Laplander snowshoes” before his near palindromic summary line, “only to show that Nantucket is no Illinois.”

Back in New Bedford, sailors just returned from a year or two at sea storm into the Spouter Inn “like an eruption of bears from Labrador,” and Father Mapple’s pulpit is “his little Quebec.” From the moment the Pequod sails, right to its disastrous end, comparisons continue from Sumatra to Finland, from Cuba to Kokovoko, an island that is “not down on any map; true places never are.”

That last remark would seem to contradict everything I am saying, except that it has taken on new meaning in 21st Century America.

No, I am not going to turn this cartographic memoir into a political pitch, but I would be remiss not to note that American cartographers today find themselves on the front lines of political reform. Who else, after all, could possibly undo the damage of highly gerrymandered districts in key electoral states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and others in time for next year when constitutionally mandated new maps are drawn based on this year’s Census?

As a corollary to Ishmael’s “true places [that] never are,” existing state maps show many of America’s congressional districts as false places that now are.

Unrigged, a book published earlier this year, tells us that those cartographers, along with citizen’s groups, already have had some success, at times testifying in courts, and always showing the results of their high tech computer work–not just what the best options are for re-districting, but how far from anything honest are so many districts drawn in 2011 following the Tea Party wave of 2010.

So let the shippers and receivers laugh, and let the rest, young and old, shrug and roll their eyes. GPS will never tell me where to go, and Siri will never tell me what to do.

To me those choices are as personal as my vote.

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For just a few examples: