Sunday, November 20, 2011

Maps to GPS

As a child in Birmingham, Alabama, I always had a good idea of where I was. Vulcan was forever there at the top of Red Mountain. With that single point of navigation, there was no need for a compass. It was almost impossible to get lost in Birmingham. Everybody just knew where they were going and even as a very small child, I could have easily directed an out of town visitor to downtown or any other destination like Ensley, Five Points West Shopping Center, and Birmingham Southern-College. And if one went over Red Mountain, you were in Shades Valley, with Shades Mountain looming to the South.

Basic topography doesn’t change, though they did chop a big chunk out of Red Mountain a few decades back to build the Red Mountain Expressway. In fact, Birmingham is now laced with expressways, just like any other US city. Fundamentally, however, getting around town is still simpler than in most places because of the mountains and Vulcan is still watching over the city.
I never saw my parents look at a local road map, but when we traveled, maps were essential. My mother would serve as map-reader and chief navigator. In those days, maps were free. You simply picked them up at the gas station. We had a collection of maps from mostly Gulf and Standard Oil. And since maps were free, from about the time I could read, I was also given my own map copy so I could follow along and make suggestions.

My first job, summer of my freshman year in college, was a transportation “coder” for the Alabama Highway Department. For a special project, in summer of 1965, they hired a bunch of college girls to work on coding the results of an origin-destination study. Basically, they stopped people traveling down main roads around Birmingham and asked them where they had been and where they were going. Our job was to take those tickets, look at a special map that was divided by zones, and write in the zone for both the origin and the destination. The Highway Department then sent this data to a big computer in Georgia (guess that was the nearest one) to convert this data into a report they could use for planning new roads. It wasn’t difficult work, and our team of rising sophomore co-eds completed the project about two weeks early. For the remainder of the summer we arrived at 8 a.m. each morning at our work place (an old house scheduled for condemnation) and playing cards each day for $1.25 per hour (minimum wage). They wanted us there in case they needed anything, but otherwise, we were to keep ourselves amused!

I graduated from Auburn and then married a New Yorker. He knew his way around the city on the subways. He clearly had a subway map in his head and seemed to navigate by some mysterious force that I could not tap into. He knew which trains went where and even where to stand on the platform. To this day, I just surrender and tag along like a lost child. Of course, they have changed a few things about the NY subways system since he left there in 1964 and he now requires a map.

When we lived in southern Illinois a few years later I was continually lost. There were no mountains to navigate by; just endless cornfields. What I would have given for a GPS!
Navigating in Southern California was not that hard because we once again had mountains to guide us. But we maintained a collection of road maps to use exploring the surrounding areas – mountains, desert and Pacific coast. Cross-country trips home to Alabama and New York, made us quickly gain expertise in reading maps. We always kept a big road atlas in the car, along with our vast collection of gas station maps.

When we moved to the Annapolis, Maryland area in 1976, my husband’s new employer gave him a local map. It was a single sheet of white paper with a hand drawn map of key roads. Unfortunately, it omitted what then called “the New Severn River Bridge.” We had a hard time getting around in our house-hunting efforts until a realtor suggested we buy an Anne Arundel County map book. Once again, we were in sync and able to function.

We always had a rule – never throw a map away. So we continued to collect maps – gas station maps gave way to AAA maps and our collection gained fancy maps with glossy stiff covers. I kept them all in a filing cabinet in alpha order. The years went by and the collection grew.
Then a few years ago, we got a GPS and that changed everything. I have to admit a love-hate relationship with Nigel. I should add that we picked Nigel because he seems to approach it more in a subservient role than does Jill, his US alter ego. Jill always seemed to have an attitude when she said “recalculating.” And of course, that is whole problem with the GPS concept. The GPS is telling you what to do. If you use a map, you are looking at the whole situation and making an informed decision about your route. These are two fundamentally different mindsets and for someone like me, who likes to be in control, listening to a GPS is an annoyance.

I wish I could say that Nigel was 100% reliable. He lost a lot of credibility the other night in DC when he took me through bumper-to-bumper traffic in totally the wrong direction and made me late. I think it is because he took a tumble from the dashboard in a sudden stop and somehow was directing me in a confused state. His head, however, now seems to have cleared, though yesterday I think he was having some cognitive trouble, again in DC. Of course, he is not the only one!
This summer I got rid of many of our maps. We always go the AAA store and pick up new ones for any new road trip anyway. I still like to look at a map when planning a trip. Of course, we will also bring along Nigel and his alter ego, Jill, and our iphones with their bouncing blue ball navigation. Getting “lost” used to be a real possibility. And I still have my built in sense of topography that allows me to “intuit” my way around and to just know when we are approaching our destination.

I just read about a hot new thing that people are doing called geo-caching where people hide stuff in the back country and others seek out the cache using their GPSs. I don’t think I will take this up. Just finding restaurants in DC using my GPS is adventure enough for me.

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