1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
|
It was a bit of an odd child. I loved map shops. I am old enough to remember when there were stores that sold nothing but maps, and I wanted all of them, but especially USGS 7.5 topo maps of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. I would beg my parents to take me to take me and then spend all my lawn mowing money on maps.
Then I'd go home and piece them together to plan hiking and climbing trips around the Sierras. While I'd been hiking in the high sierras since I was born, it was my first multi-day backpacking trip the summer after eighth grade that really got me into maps. I got some books from the library, taught myself basic navigation and map and compass reading skills and eventually planned my first trip for later that same summer after eighth grade.
From then on I became the trip planner among my friends. I quickly learned two things. The first was that while I could look at a map and immediately and easily translate it to a three dimension model that I could then spin around and contemplate in my head, um, turns out this is very difficult for many people. I realized most people looked at the topo and saw a lot of lines and nothing more.
The second thing I learned was more profound, and I had to learn it the hard way, by underestimating just how close together those lines on the topo were. It's one thing to look at the map and see that something is steep. It's a whole other thing to stand at the base of a long uphill climb and watch the trail zigzag its way up the exposed, bare granite peaks above timberline.
The reality on the ground is always different than the elegant simplicity of the map. Always. Everything turns out to be steeper, longer, hotter, and much harder than it looks on the map.
The map is just that, a map. A representation of reality. Not reality. After experiencing this a few times I learned what those densely clustered lines really meant, not that it was steep or difficult, but that it was going to be a hard, hot slog. Years later, when I read Jorge Borges and came across his rather famous remark, the map is not the territory I knew first hand exactly what he meant.
That the maps is not the territory is one those rare truths that applies both literally and metaphorically to nearly everything.
|
