THE UNSPIN ROOM: No maps on my taps anymore
A map of the original water courses on the island of Manhattan, circa 1865. Relying on GPS instead of maps has taken the fun out of exploring different areas, the author states. PHOTO COURTESY OF DALTON DELAN FROM THE COLLECTION OF LEN BERSON
Americans are traveling again this summer. But it’s a paper trail no longer. Cue the GPS. Rewind to my first year in TV, when there were lines down the block at fill-up stations, and a documentary came out called “No Maps on My Taps.” It was about tap dancing. But there were plenty of Esso maps at my neighborhood pumps since the Mideast squeeze on oil kept everybody close to home. Déjà vu. More Carter than cartography. As was my wont, I made a habit of scarfing up every state map I could find. Kept a yellow highlighter in my Maverick to circle destinations and mark routes. I had foreign maps as well. You name it, I could guide you there. Mind you, I couldn’t help you refold them. That required a PhD.
During the pandemic, I tossed them all out. Hundreds. The last to go in COVID spring cleaning. Brought back so many memories — particularly the hyperlocal ones from hotels marked by the concierge, and diner placemat maps ringed by retail ads. If there were Mad Men on Madison Avenue, I was ABC News’ Map Man: I had one I could loan to any correspondent headed anywhere. Usually I kept a spare, since the only thing network correspondents came back with was handwritten taxi receipts for expense reimbursement and — you know who you are — social diseases and new entries in little black books of a different era. Glory days for some.
Maps as a tool go back farther than many other implements of instruction. When Christopher Columbus sailed west in 1492, he carried aboard Juan de la Cosa, who painstakingly drew the first map of the Americas in 1500. The Age of Discovery saw Spanish and Portuguese expeditions that brought back maps of African and Asian coastlines. Yet the art of cartography dates back an astounding 20,000 or more years before that. Some of the earliest maps were of the heavens rather than the oceans or land masses of earth. The Lascaux caves, drawn around 14,500 BC, feature three bright stars as well as the Pleiades cluster. Beating that, an Aboriginal Australian cylcone from 5,000 years earlier shows the Darling River, and millennia before, back in 25,000 BC, is a mapped mammoth tusk engraved in the Czech Republic.
But these triumphs of tusk, stone and cloth — ‘map’ itself derives from the Latin ‘mappa’ for tablecloth or napkin — were a rare commodity until fairly modern times. Just as the paperback or pocket book brought literature to the masses, along with the interstate highway system came the ubiquitous fold-out maps of the 50s and 60s, and past the turn of the century I still made my way to the neighborhood AAA to obtain maps and charted routes for car trips.
We might as well be talking about Boy Scouts and compasses, not to mention seafaring dead reckoning. We are now helpless without our GPS devices and apps. We are guided by the hand — turn by turn, like a doting nanny walking us to school — and our eyes in the sky and Waze and means of real-time traffic updates aren’t satisfied until they’ve shaved seconds off our journeys and rerouted us as many times as it takes to brook no obstruction. The male must get through. What guy ever asked for directions? In an age of Teslas resembling computers on wheels, it is hard to knock A.I. traffic avoidance.
Still, something is lost in no longer plotting a trip against a paper map and gathering a sense of place and placement. When I used maps, I navigated cities like a native. Now, I’m lucky if I remember how to find Carnegie Hall ‘cepting by practice, practice, practice. I feel like a foreign-language speaker so rusty that I need a geographic tetanus shot. Does it matter? If our smartphones teleport us from place to place at lightning pace, are we at home in the world, or are we more like electrons knocking about, lost in space and time?
Today, we have Google Earth, drones, old-school ‘Chopper 4’ and every other bit and byte of digital skyway to emulate a God’s-Eye view of the planet and the neighbor’s swimming pool. Yet without spacial sense, will our anxious age of loss of community be exacerbated? Already there is so little real-world tangibility to ground us. We go where the iPhone says go, take the 10,000 steps the Fitbit prescribes, stop for coffee where the Around Me app shows. Little by little, our sense of personal agency falls to computer hive mind. Baa baa birdie.
When I worked at New York’s Kaufman Astoria Studios, a Lifetime ago, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” was filming there. Today, I could hardly manage the I-5 to San Diego without a GPS. No maps on my taps anymore.
Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom.
