When I was just a little boy about 600 yards from my parent's house, in a section of town that hadn't yet been given over to tract-houses each with one spindly tree in front, there was an old gas station of the Goober-and-Gomer-school.
That is to say two guys ran it, not a giant corporate behemoth. Each of those guys had grease under their fingernails, on their denim and in their hair. They spent most of their days spelunking under Chevrolet, Studebaker, Ford and Plymouth chassis, and wheeled out from under only when someone needing gasoline would drive over the rubberized hose that would ring a bell twice announcing they needed two bucks' of ethylene, with no-knock lead added.
The area behind their little shack of a station was junk-strewn. It was filled with discarded auto parts and a boy with an imagination and without parental oversight (which few had in those days) could find himself repairing Gemini space craft with old spark plugs and fan belts. It was a toy store, of sorts, with toys you created with your imagination.
They also had an old Coke machine aside the garage itself. The kind that stored bottles like soldiers at attention on a ramp. If you had a dime and permission, you pulled a handle and a bottle would roll down like an earthquake, cold as a dead fish. There was a slot with a bottle opener and bottle caps fallen like snowflakes, their Jughead serrated-brimmed whoopie caps looking up at the sky.
In those days gas stations gave out road maps the way today giant consultancies hand out white-papers. They often had maps of places I only dreamed of. Not nearby states--the states whose license plates you might see on a given day--but far away lands inhabited by cowboys, Indians, farmers and stampeding herds of long horns.
Often I'd sneak in their cramped little office find a pile of maps and like some latter-day treasure seeker, rifle through the place hoping for Arizona, or Colorado, or Idaho--which I imagined was filled to the brim with nothing but potatoes.
Over the last 65-years my love of maps has hardly abated. Though we're meant to be satisfied with advances like GPS that tell us exactly how to get from A to B, exploring maps, marveling at the topographic detail, wondering about place-names is a form of exploring in and of itself. What's more, most of the arriving people do comes from first getting lost. GPS doesn't allow lost-ness. Therefore, foundness is also obviated.
In my well-lighted yet partially-subterranean office I have dozens of books of maps. These allow me to travel to places I'll likely never go, and to time-travel too. They give me ideas about how worlds are created. How setting and space are important. And how to show people the world so you can inform, excite and persuade them. If you're an advertising person, you might think of the messages you create as a form of road map. A guide to readers to visit and explore whatever it is you're charged with selling.
There are as many different sorts of maps as there are sorts of places. I probably have 3,000 years or so in my small space. From Thucydides' accounts of the conquest of Alexander, to Strabo's compendium, to 15th Century Atlases like the Nuremberg Chronicle.
Of course, Edward Tufte is a map-maker. As is David McCandless. And the less-well-known Hannah Ritchie, who works at the surpassing site "Our World in Data." She is worth following. Her site worth seeing.
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| This also is a map. |
A map is anything that plots out a path that makes understanding easier. They don't have to be about how to get to I87 from I24. They can be about anything that could be helped by directions that show you the way.
More often than not, even if we no longer know it, that's our job.
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