I’ve always loved maps.
I credit my longtime love of the New York Yankees to my love for maps, which goes back even further. I had flash cards with maps of the states and countries of the world, and memorized the shapes, capitals and other facts before I was six years old. The cute-little-kid stories my Mom told about me often involved maps (gnawing my toast into the shape of New Hampshire and correcting a TV quiz show that said Detroit was on Lake Huron. I knew it was on Lake St. Clair). As far back as I can remember, I knew I was born in upstate New York (Sampson Air Force Base).
When my parents returned to the United States after a three-year assignment in England, the summer I was five, I amused myself (and probably bored and annoyed the rest of the family) by following our cross-country drive to our next home in Utah on my flash cards, chattering about the facts of each state we crossed.
And since New York was my favorite flash card and my favorite state (though I was starting to like Utah), New York became my team that October (1960), when the Yankees played the Pirates in the World Series. While Bill Mazeroski broke my heart that fall, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris cemented my love of the Yankees the next year.
And my love of maps was cemented even earlier. In my many travels, I always pick up some maps in advance or along the way: state maps, national maps, regional maps, city maps, national park maps, public transportation maps. I always had a map. I’m not saying I never got lost, but I was usually able to figure out where I was and find my way to where I needed to go.
I kept most of the maps and compiled quite a collection: I have U.S. maps from San Diego to Florida and back to Washington, Canadian maps from Nova Scotia to Vancouver Island. I even have maps of places I haven’t been (tried to get my editors to send me to Sudan once, so I have a North Africa map).
But I’m ready to dump my map collection. I still love maps, but I haven’t unfolded a paper map in quite a while. My box of maps has stayed on a shelf in the closet since I moved to a new office last year. And it’s not making the next move.
Who needs paper maps any more? I follow the directions on my iPhone or from the GPS voice in my car (Mimi wishes I wouldn’t argue with the voice so much when she gets the directions wrong). If I want paper as a backup, I print out a map from Google, Rand McNally or Mapquest.
I still love maps. Just playing with Google maps, I have created personal maps, such as my work travels and fun places (might need to update them).
But just as I’m moving on from paper to pixels in my professional life, I guess I’m doing it in other interests.
I’ll probably pitch my maps. But if you love maps and live in the Cedar Rapids area, I’ll be glad to pass them on. (Update: My son, Tom, who inherited my love for maps, has claimed them.) I don’t want to move the maps again. But it’s kind of hard to throw them away. And don’t even ask for my baseballs autographed by Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra or Whitey Ford. Some things have no digital substitute. Yet.
I totally agree, but it still gives me an uneasy feeling once in a while. I know that the internet is a pretty robust thing; lots of redundancy and alternative pathways and all that. Still, we’d be pretty lost (not just map-wise), if we’d thrown out all the paper backups and then the whole thing crashed one day …
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I still unfold print maps whenever I ride mass transit in big cities. Although I do use online transit planning, it’s nice having paper to fall back on when I’m en route.
I do see us moving away from paper maps as a society, especially for the primary reasons why we use maps. However, many paper maps have a certain amount of design elegance that their digital counterparts often fail to replicate.
If I had a spare wall, I would take my unused maps and create a collage — spreading all of the destinations and routes across the blank canvas.
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[…] blogged occasionally about personal matters: my search for the perfect sunset, my drowned iPhone, throwing away my maps, my mother’s fading memory, a surprising honor, and selling our Cedar Rapids condo. I told […]
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