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

forty-six of the fifty state high points and come within a thousand feet of two more. “I got blown off Mount Hood [in Oregon] in a snowstorm once,” he tells me in a thick, friendly southernaccent. “I doubt if I’ll get Alaska. I’m older now, and I’m more decrepit, and I’ve got too much steel in my back.”
    But most U.S. high points aren’t the forbidding peaks you’re picturing, like Hood or McKinley. * Only five require real mountaineering; the rest are doable even if you’re a rookie like me who thinks a crampon is something you might buy in that pink aisle of a drugstore. Some are even less rugged than Mount Greylock: Delaware’s highest point, for example, is in a trailer park. Ohio’s is a vocational school flagpole. The highest point in Florida is Britton Hill—at 345 feet, the lowest high point in any state and considerably lower than many Florida skyscrapers. † It’s a rest stop. “Watch out if you use the restrooms there! There are copperhead snakes,” Craig says helpfully.
    It’s a strangely arbitrary pursuit, visiting places with no inherent interest just because the capriciousness of manmade borders has put them on your checklist. George Mallory said he wanted to climb Everest “because it’s there,” but what brings three hundred people a year to a slight rise in an Iowa cornfield? There’s really nothing to see; Mallory might say they’re visiting “because the map says something’s there, but there really isn’t.” The quest is even more puzzling in the cases of collectors like Peter Holden, who has eaten at more than twelve thousand McDonald’s restaurants, or “Winter,” ‡ who has visitedall but twenty of the 8,500 Starbucks locations in North America. They never get to check off a Mount Shasta or a Tahiti from their lists. Their travel goals are dull, ubiquitous, and nearly identical. They are voyagers of the suburban strip mall, pathfinders of the parking lot. But they take their obsession no less seriously. Holden once ate at forty-five Detroit-area McDonald’s in a single day (his standard order is two Big Macs, but on marathon days, he’ll settle for a diet soda or a packet of McDonaldland cookies to save for later.) A documentary about Winter’s lonely crusade shows him living out of his car and even sucking spilled coffee out of his grimy cup holder at one point, because he’ll check off a Starbucks only once he finishes the drink he buys.
    Dr. Alan Hogenauer, a former airline executive and tourism marketing consultant, has coined the name “systematic travel” for this kind of geographic completism and teaches the concept to his travel and tourism students at Loyola Marymount. There’s no question that he practices what he preaches. His website lists no less than 396 different checklists he’s either working on or has completed. He’s most famous for being the first person ever to visit every site in the national park system, * but he’s also visited all eleven parishes of Barbados, all thirty “Historic Houses of Worship” in the city of Philadelphia, all fifty-one weather stations in Thailand, and every U.S. presidential birthplace. At this point he’s resorted to inventing new things he can count, as I learn when I track him down days after a weekend jaunt to Casablanca. “That gave me Africa in January,” he explains proudly. “Now I have all seventy-two ‘continent-months’: visiting some point in every continent in every calendar month.”
    Two maps hang in Hogenauer’s office at Loyola, neatly displaying his travel history with pushpins and intricate webs of string. Thetangle is so dense over much of the world, like North America, that he can’t add new routes anymore. He insists that checklists are just a means to an end, an excuse to explore. “Look, if I’d helicoptered into every national park, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. But by going to each one, and finding out how to get there, and linking it to everything else, and seeing