Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings Read Free Book Online Page A

Fodor’s. (If you go to the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, get your visa stamp on a separate piece of paper, or you won’t be allowed back into Azerbaijan! Prepare for mud if you’re hiking to Taki Falls, the highest waterfall in the Micronesian nation of Palau!) Every luncheon ends with a travelogue lecture from a recently returned club member—right now, as Chris and I talk at the back of the banquet hall, a slide presentation on Papua New Guinea is beginning; many members are taking notes. I look up just in time to see the phrase “Penis gourds” appear on a PowerPoint bullet list. Then comes the photo—yup, penis gourds are exactly what you think they are. It’s a little hard to keep eye contact with someone when there’s a gigantic penis gourd hovering right behind his head.
    As a member of the Travelers’ Century Club executive board, Chris has a vote on which destinations will or won’t make the official TCC list of destinations. This is trickier than it sounds: there are only 192 member states of the United Nations, but the TCC recognizes a whopping 319 different “countries,” including any territory that’s somehow removed from its parent nation. This seems sensible in some cases (surely Paris and Tahiti shouldn’t count as the same “country” to world travelers just because one still administers the other) but leads to absurdity in others (Alaska is a separate country by TCC rules, while Indonesia somehow counts as eight different countries). “Even though we have these slightly strange rules, we take them very seriously,” says Chris and, unbidden, starts patiently explaining to me why the board recently voted to make Abkhazia—but not South Ossetia, another breakaway Georgian region—a TCC “country.” This is evidently not the first time he’s had to go through this with angry club members. I nod sagely as he runs down the obvious differences between Abkhazian and South Ossetian infrastructure, a little nervous that there might be a quiz later.
    Many people took up country collecting because they heard about the TCC, but the reverse is more often true: these were people who were already obsessive checklist travelers before they knew there was an organization collecting dues for it. Every few years, someone writes in to The New York Times ’ travel column asking if there’s a club for people who count countries, and the editor dutifully runs the TCC’s mailing address. The same process of accretion built the Highpointers Club, whose three thousand members are dedicated to visiting the highest elevation in every U.S. state. The club was founded by Jack Longacre, an Arkansas trucker who enjoyed visiting state high points and started noticing the same names recorded in all the peak registers, some boasting about their personal counts. “ My God! ” he remembered marveling. “There must be others out there with no more sense than myself!” In 1986, the editors of Outdoor magazine let him run a short item looking for like-minded collectors; thirty replied. The following year, nine of them met atop Mount Arvon, Michigan’s highest point, and that became the first of the club’s annual “Konventions.” *
    I suppose I also started highpointing before I knew there was a club. A few years ago, my wife and I hiked Mount Greylock in northwest Massachusetts to admire the fall foliage in the Berkshires from above. It was an easy hike—at only 3,491 feet, Mount Greylock is less than half the elevation of Flora Mountain, the hundredth tallest peak in my home state of Washington—but somehow I felt very rugged and manly knowing I was standing atop the entire state of Massachusetts. After discovering online that as many as ten thousand like-minded people share that rush, I track down Craig Noland, official Highpointers “membership guy.” He’s manning the club’s sign-up table at a Smoky Mountain wilderness show in Pigeon Force, Tennessee, when I call him up.
    Craig’s been to