Geography 101

Those little children whose parents subscribed to the National Geographic were the fortunate ones. They had the advantage of an open window from where they could see the world. Now, in later times, television has reduced-or expanded-that view. It's a different medium that, unless video-copying is cataloged for educational reference, lacks shelf use and the recall value that an atlas has.

Beyond the first reputation that adolescent boys thirsted after in borrowed glances of Geographics in the sections about Borneo, middle Africa and exotic islands, there was print, print that the Grosvenor family brought to houses of people who never would be able to go so far away from their own homes. And beyond the print and pictures were great maps that made their issues fatter.

I would spread a map upon a table and read those names that were of familiar importance to other people. I would place my finger here....or there, upon a town or a valley or a mountain range or a river full of fish and commerce or all at once touch a desert and snow capped mountains and great forests.

My sister, with her equals Peggy Delia and Florence Groves and Mary Evans would touch a magic instrument that would glide across their Ouija Board and pick away little secrets of no importance. At my table I would reveal far greater ones on maps that incidentally showed me where those bare-breasted women in Borneo and middle Africa and exotic islands lived.

Today's kids have their share of bare-breasted women too, but video and glossy magazines are banal stuff that invites them to leer at girls from Cincinnati and El Paso and Brookline and it ends there.

In school, the classroom had a big globe that we could spin around and by it became more aware of the world. We'd wonder if the borders of countries were really big black painted lines. We'd wonder if the people who lived in Chile and Australia and Madagascar were standing upside down. And we knew if a country was pink it belonged to Britain and if it was purple it belonged to France and the rest of us shared the other colors.

We made maps in our grammar school geography class. Drawing Pennsylvania was easy unless you were cock-eyed and then it might look like Tennessee. Kids who lived in Colorado or Wyoming were denied incentive right from the start; better challenges faced those who mapped Maine and Alaska and Florida and New Jersey. Draw those places and you might find a vocation.

Our education was expanded by maps because physical geography told us where coal and coffee and tobacco and cotton and oil and wheat and corn and steel and other commodities were produced in strength. Those black lines that we vainly looked for when we went to Massachusetts or Maryland, lines that separated states and nations were the simple introduction to Political geography. The maps that we first saw in National Geographic and in school textbooks were constantly changed by the greater ambitions of national despots to keep cartographers a busy lot. Our eyes would fall upon the new editions as war drew the whole world into conflict. Suddenly North Africa and Italy and Russia and China and France and far away worlds became as real and certain to us as Smilin' Jack, Little Orphan Annie, Prince Valiant, Tarzan, The Katzenjammer Kids, all travellers in comic-strips who had passports to adventures <@145>round the world.

When I was eight years old I knew that Pearl Harbor wasn't a girl. In later generations kids might believe that a Castro Convertible was a Cuban automobile. At nine I could find Bougainville and Guadalcanal on a map, the other Syracuse that is in Sicily and Sevastopol in Crimea. Before I was eleven towns like St. Lo and Aachen and Tunis and Manila, rivers named Po, Rhone, Dnieper and Bug, and islands that were little dots at the far side of the world called Truk, Saipan, Yap and Iwo Jima all became places of familiarity because they were consecrated by the blood of a great host of warriors and to us were recalled as easily as the names of the streets we always knew: Mayland, Musgrave, Duval, Belfield, Tulpehocken, Cliveden, Haines and Rittenhouse.

All of this was before my generation would have more serious interest in trips to places like Pusan and Seoul and Teagu and in a later war in Hue and Saigon and lesser villages in Cambodia and other rotten places. And for those of us who could make choices it would be a happier experience to now, as adults, run our fingers here...or there, in England at Thaxted or Enfield or Burnham on Crouch, in Wales at Bridgend or Caerau or Caswell Bay, and in Canada at Haliburton or Kleinburg or Lac du L'ile, quiet places in other countries. Or closer to home we would touch Fleetwood or Newport or Cape May. Our touch would revive the physical geography of this place or that one, of hills rolling away to the sky, of meadows bright with rape or daffodil, of the sea lapping quiet beaches, of friendly streets. A touch would open our minds' eye to see some of those who lived there.

Others push instruments across Ouija boards that, in the greater convulsions of change, affect new interests different from first inclinations that told us where the bare-breasted women lived.