Read Online Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings - Free Book Online Page B

signals on Highway 99 between Seattle and his grandparents’ house in Portland every summer and still has a voluminous collection of old gas station maps. John inherited his family’s navigator position at the tender age of nine, when a road atlas got thrown at him in the backseat after Mom misread the map once toooften. For years, a buff like Mark or John would study the highways with the sad conviction that he was the only person in the world so fascinated with cloverleafs and control cities. * The phenomenon didn’t get a name until the dawn of the Internet, when these lonely “roads scholars” were surprised to discover thousands of like-minded enthusiasts all over the world. “Great,” Mark’s daughter likes to tell him. “All fifty people that are interested in highways can now find each other.”
    Even better, the Internet gave roadgeeks a place to “publish” their work. Photography is a huge part of roadgeek travel; when test-driving a new car, the dedicated buff will always check to see how a camera would fit up front, the better to take dashboard photos of every mileage sign and junction of their future expeditions. Buffs might feel a little silly keeping thousands of these snapshots in shoe boxes under their bed, but on the Web, they can be shared with the public: a permanent record of their journeys, even if no one ever looks at it. Every roadgeek website includes pages of these nearly identical photos, an endless stream of green rectangles and “Exit Only” arrows and the taillights of semitrucks. These aren’t rare findings, like a bird-watcher’s photos; after all, millions of motorists see the exact same views every year. But central to the roadgeek urge is the certainty that these journeys must be documented—collected, even. Roadgeeks often boast of how many routes they’ve “clinched”—that is, driven every single mile of. † It’s a very specific—and attainable—form of systematic travel.
    And maybe the very banality of these driver’s-eye slide shows is their real value. Though the rest of us may take it for granted, the U.S. Interstate Highway System is one of the most remarkable engineering feats ever conceived. Its origins date back to 1919, when a young army officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower, missing his family in California, agreed to join a cross-country convoy of military vehicles heading for the West Coast. Part of the company’s mission was to find outif these trucks and staff cars—which had just won a grueling trench war in Europe, mind you—were even capable of surviving the trip. In 1919, driving from sea to shining sea wasn’t the leisurely five-day tour we know today. Paved roads largely disappeared outside major American cities, so the convoy had to contend with mud, dust, ruts, unstable bridges, and even quicksand. Their “successful” entry into San Francisco came sixty-two days after starting out (an average speed of six miles per hour!), and the convoy lost nine vehicles and twenty-one men * in the 230 accidents they suffered along the way. Eisenhower never forgot the ordeal, especially when compared to the expansive and well-maintained autobahn network he saw in Germany during the Second World War. In 1956, as president, he signed the Interstate Highway System into law, authorizing 41,000 miles of super-highways with a combined land area the size of the state of Delaware and using enough cement to build eighty Hoover Dams. It was the greatest peacetime public works project in history.
    And yet, unlike the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, tourists don’t line up every day of the year to ooh and aah over the interstate system. In fact, we literally grind it underfoot in our haste to arrive at, and photograph, far less impressive bits of roadside construction (the Corn Palace; the world’s largest rocking chair; Branson, Missouri). Roads are like maps in that we think about them only when they don’t do their job and we wind up lost or stuck or