My older daughter was traveling back to grad school with her car last January, and we had MapQuested her trip from our home in Massachusetts to Pittsburgh, a journey of more than 600 miles, or 10 hours and 20 minutes without stops.
Kate, despite her math smarts, is not good with directions, but I don’t think it is entirely her fault. People nowadays—and not just young people—do not like to encumber themselves with Rand McNally or Michelin books of maps, displaying every state in the union. Instead, they go to their laptops, print out directions to wherever they are going, and they’re off.
I have to admit, I was mighty impressed the first time I used MapQuest, for a journey from Massachusetts to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The directions took me from my driveway to my brother’s summer rental without a missed step for the entire 712 miles. I thought, life is amazing, and technology adds to the shine.
As Kate was walking out the door to begin her drive to Pittsburgh, I tried to go over the directions with her, since she had never driven that far by herself. But she didn’t want to listen to my last-minute instructions. And when I walked out to the car with my book of maps, she scowled.
“I don’t need those.”
“Just in case.”
“I don’t want them.”
“Just take them—they’ll come in handy if you get lost. If you veer off course from the MapQuest map, you won’t know where you are.” Begrudgingly, she tossed them into the back seat.
In Harrisburg, Pa., instead of merging onto Interstate 76, she found herself miles from where she wanted to be, on rural Route 22—a two-lane highway with lights and slow-moving traffic meandering its measly narrow way through small towns, past farms and those small convenience stores connected to two-pump gas stations. She called me, and I told her to get out the maps and see if she could find a route that would take her south and back to 76. She did.
I teach travel writing every spring semester. Each of the students has to take a trip during spring break and write a long travel essay as his or her final assignment. Some of the kids take the college-sponsored trips, others concoct their own.
One of my students took a ski trip, but the focus of her essay was on how she had become lost on her way to New Hampshire. She had used Google Maps, but the address she had for the ski resort was incorrect, so she got lost like my Kate. But she did not have maps in the back seat of her car. After a failed attempt to right herself with the limited assistance of a gas-station attendant, she called the resort on her cellphone and was guided to her destination.
As we discussed the essay assignment, it became clear to me that the students hadn’t consulted maps before they took their trips. I then took an informal survey in class: “Who reads maps?”
No one.
One girl told of her road trip using a friend’s GPS system—she didn’t need maps. Not one student used maps. They had all learned to drive with the aid of Google and MapQuest.
This does not bother me, but I do tell students that if they plan to travel to a foreign country without an expensive cellphone with fancy applications, they will need to know how to read a map.
I remember being a kid traveling in my family’s nine-passenger station wagon. The glove compartment was stuffed with maps because my father traveled a great deal for his job. I’d sit in the front seat and unfold all the crinkly creases, laying the maps out along the dashboard, dreaming of all the places I’d go when I finally was allowed to drive.
The cities and towns sounded as exotic as any Pacific atoll—Chippewa Falls, Henniker, Oklahoma City, Boulder, Punta Gorda. I’d imagine how beautiful everything would be—snow on a high peak in the Rockies, bluebonnets in a meadow outside of Houston, the muddy Mississippi where it joins the Ohio in Cairo, Ill. There in the front seat of my father’s car, I embraced the danger and the grandness of driving into those towns, my car and me dusty from the road, me holding a map in one hand and shielding my eyes with the other as I stared off into the wide, wild horizon.
On the final day of class, I brought in a map that showed where each of the students had traveled, their names affixed to small white flags on pins stuck into the cities and towns of their spring-break destinations. I wanted them to get a better sense of the expanse of these great United States and show them that if you get on the Mass Pike in Boston, you can ride that ample blue-colored interstate all the way west to Chicago and beyond. I wanted them to imagine the parade of states, to notice how in New York, Route 90 bends to make way for Lake Erie as it shuttles through to Illinois; to envision the road climbing to Sioux Falls, S.D., then through Wyoming into Montana’s Big Sky country, and finally sliding into Washington.
We also traced how if you climbed aboard Interstate 95 in Houlton, Me., after about 33 hours and 1 minute (if you never stop driving), you would end up in the Florida Keys, on old Route 1, probably with the windows rolled down admiring the palm trees.
No one in my class knew that the interstates with even numbers run east and west and the ones with the odd numbers run north and south, but it is not their fault. It would have been mine if I had not brought in my maps. The students were in awe of the engineering foresight involved in laying out these grand roadways.
This past spring, when I taught travel writing again, I arrived on the first day of class with an armload of maps. As I spread them out before my students, their eyes widened in amazement. There we were, in our classroom in the small harbor city of Salem, Mass., snug against the great Atlantic Ocean. To our north lies Canada; to the south, Argentina; far, far to the west, China; and to the east, Spain. We were literally unfolding the world in which we live, beginning to dream—as only maps allow us to dream, to imagine what lies beyond our borders.
