Why I fell in love with maps

The World
A NASA image of Mercury

I have no idea when I first learned about maps. But, I remember learning the meaning of "wanderlust" when I was 11. We'd just gotten back from travelling around Europe and I recall being seized by nostalgia, longing, and a desperate craving to go back and see more.

Travel was nothing new to me even at 11. I'd had a passport for years. School vacations, holiday weekends all meant trips. Even school weeks sometime meant trips. Road trips and plane trips. Visits with far-flung relatives. Family vacations tacked on to my dad's business trips. Trips meant days spent exploring city alleys or wilderness trails in new places with new accents that spoke new words. I loved the different buildings, different cultures and different trees. It was scary and exciting. But I always looked forward to the next place we were heading.

In between trips I stared at maps. Not just ones of the places we were planning to go. There were the topographics of our hilly neighborhood that made perfect sense. And my dad's maps of marine boundaries that made no sense. The wall map of the US in my bedroom. The out-of-date globe in the den. Stacks of Triple A Highway maps. And my favorites — the ones in the Rand McNally Atlas of the World that probably weighed more than me.  

These maps could help me conjure up places I knew and give me a glimpse into places I wanted to know. They tied me over until the next time I could actually go be somewhere else. And when there, they organized what I was seeing.

I keep hearing that maps are going away. No one needs maps if Siri can just tell us where and when to turn. But that's not the same. It's not just about knowing how to get somewhere. It's knowing how the pieces of a place fit together. The relationship between this place and that is what matters.

At least for now technology has made maps better than ever. Today when I travel I spend a crazy amount of time with online maps. Reviewing where I've been at the end of the day and planning where I'll go the next day. Smartphone map apps have been a godsend. It's all on my iPhone wherever I am. I like to think that means I can walk around a city navigating my way while looking like an idiot local walking and texting instead of a idiot tourist with a fanny pack and a laminated accordion map. And then when I'm home I can use the online maps to go back in my mind.

But the best development in mapland is Google Street View. Street View bestills my wanderlust beset heart. Want to be somewhere else? it's just a click away.

I can't imagine what my child self would have thought of virtual exploring courtesy of Street View. It's virtual reality and virtual surreality. The surreal part of is that the faces of the people are blurred out. It oddly makes the 'walk' down the city streets of New York, Oslo, or London seem more personal and the scenery more about you. But even with out faces, the ghostly people still look of the place. In Reykjavik the street fashion of the blurred out people is quirky, different, and comfortable looking. In Paris it's chic and refined, if perhaps not so comfortable.

It's no substitute for being there, but street view, maybe, just maybe, helps me scratch some weird travel itch without leaving the couch.

Wanderlust is a great word for capturing that itch to travel, but mixed with it for me was always a big dose of nostalgia or something approximating that. I've read that while German in origin, the word 'wanderlust' has fallen out of favor in Germany. It's been replaced in modern usage with 'fernweh.' It's literal meaning is 'farsickness.' Farsickness. That feels like the ailment I suffered from all my life. I had just never had the right name for it.

What I can't decide is whether having a detailed map of the world on my smartphone has made my farsickness better or worse.

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