Off the Map
For reasons unknown to me, a stereotype has evolved to label most women as map-challenged. Well, maybe there are anecdotes that lend credence to the stereotype, such as the experience of a friend who with his wife was driving from Pennsylvanias to Florida before the completion of the interstate highway system. After stopping for lunch, the two reentered the road and mistakenly headed north, the wife reading the map. Some time later, the husband asked her to check the map, which she began to do, then, in frustration after trying to orient it, ripped it up and threw it out the window. Ah! Those were the days long before car navigation systems. Then there’s a scene in the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz movie The Long, Long Trailer in which Lucy, holding the map as Desi drives, abruptly says, “Turn right here (pause)…left,” causing her husband to swerve right— into a narrow lane off a busy highway, and making backing out nearly impossible. And in my own experience driving a university van during a field trip with college students to places off the beaten path in search of rock outcrops to study geology in situ, a student reading a map (still in pre-satellite-navigation days) said quietly, “Turn (muffled by the noisy van) left,” to which I responded in double checking what I thought I heard, “Left?” The student said loudly, “Right!” That one I heard, so I turned right. (During all subsequent field trips, I asked the map reader to respond, “Correct” or “No,” when I double checked the direction)
Road Atlas
I’m not sure how Rand McNally maps still sell in an age of car navigation systems and smart phones, but they obviously do. There’s a website for the company’s road atlases. So, if your car or smart phone doesn’t direct you, you can navigate the old fashioned way of opening an impossible to refold flat map or a cumbersome large atlas so big it blocks the windshield. But the company still exists, so obviously some people are buying paper maps—meaning some people still know how to read them.
Road maps are reliable unless there are new highways or detours, which most navigation systems recognize, whereas printed maps need updating for new highways and never keep up with detours. Nevertheless, that Rand McNally still has a business makes me think that map-reading, like reading script, hasn’t completely gone the way of Latin. (By the way, I heard there’s a job opening in D.C. for someone who can read script, a job engendered by the discovery of documents written in English script that many public schools have stopped teaching in an age of “txt messaging and emojis”)
So, now the home of Andrew McNally has been wiped off the map by the January, 2025, fires in California. That house and other notable California locations have disappeared into ash just as the empire of Ozymandias disappeared into the desert sands. Future Rand McNally atlases might note the “historical” location of the house for interested travelers on a trip to see once notable landmarks.
And that makes me think of the fleeting nature of most human structures. Sure, the pyramids in Egypt and the Americas, the Great Wall in China and Hadrian’s Wall in the UK have endured; and even the pre-Columbian earthen mounds built in North America are still mappable, but much of what we humans have built has been wiped off the map by natural and human events. Wars, for example, have been especially efficient in making maps “old” or outdated.
Antique maps teach us the lesson of our impermanence. With only a relatively small number of exceptions (like those pyramids), our principal structures are subject to abandonment, decay, and destruction—as the McNally house exemplifies. Neighborhoods change; routes between them change; major population centers have come and gone the way of Timbuktu and Gobekli Tepe. Were he alive today, Andrew McNally, founder of the mapmaking company, might have difficulty finding the remains of his burned house among the rubble of an area decimated by the fires. Without familiar landmarks, most of us would be hard pressed to find our own neighborhoods even with old maps.
And that reminds me of the observation by a comedian I heard on the radio. (Sorry, can’t remember whom I’m paraphrasing) He said that in going into a small town and asking for directions, he heard, “Just go down this street past the lot where the old oak used to be and turn left. If you pass the drugstore they tore down last year, you’ve gone too far.”
The trees are gone on the road to the McNally house. All the landmarks are gone. The revised road atlas might give the road or street, but it might not list the once-thriving community. We are temporary. Our maps, which are the records of our presence, quickly become antique.