Last week on Columbus Day I sympathized with the great navigator because of his inadequate maps. I know just how he felt out there in the trackless ocean. Five hundred and twenty-six years after his famous voyage, I can’t find any decent maps either. They seem to have vanished, along with the dial telephone and the doctor’s friendly house call.
We recently tried to buy some new maps for road trips out of state. What could be simpler? You used to be able to find maps everywhere: pharmacies, airports, railroad stations, and of course at bookstores when there were any bookstores. At gas stations the attendant would pump your gas, clean your windshield, check your oil and, if you were obviously a stranger, offer a free map. Now we pump our own gas, the windshield stays dirty, the oil level remains a mystery, and if we are lost we stay lost. There are no maps, free or otherwise. Amazon could offer only a big atlas covering the whole country, which would be like buying the complete works of Marcel Proust for a quick read in the dentist’s waiting room.
Kind friends have suggested that we could get up to date and use a GPS, but I’ve tried those and it’s nothing like having a map. A GPS is like a tunnel through a fog. You can’t tell where you are going, or where you have been. You can’t plan anything about your journey. You can’t enjoy the scenery or watch the road because you have to peer at a tiny screen, and you can’t even have a coherent conversation because of the annoying voice instructions, especially when they tell you to do things you cannot possibly do, like “Turn round right now.” In my experience the GPS is unreliable, temperamental, and often simply wrong. The machine takes you its own way, not the way you would choose, leaving you adrift in an unknown space like a child being led, or misled, by the hand. Every tour is a mystery tour.
This fading of geographical awareness into an electronic haze is serious. The president of London’s Royal Geographical Society has warned that satellite navigation systems are depriving us of the ability to read maps at all.
Geographical skills already vary greatly by age. My generation learned to read maps in geography class at school, to identify the landmarks and symbols and physical features of a landscape. Now it is an archaic skill. Maps are a mystery to this generation, which is a great shame, because real maps are full of rich topographical detail. Often they are beautiful too, almost an art form. I have always enjoyed and trusted maps. Reading a large-scale map is almost as good as being there, and sometimes better than being there.
A map allows us to answer the second most difficult of all existential questions: "Where am I?" The GPS doesn’t care where you are, only where you are going. Quite apart from the Orwellian implications of those eyes in the sky, it feels like yet another step towards making us helplessly dependent on fragile technologies that we don’t even begin to understand and that may break down at any moment, leaving us all quite literally lost in space.
Copyright: David Bouchier
