Mental Maps and the Modern Microcosm

ewis and Clark measured the land they passed across, pace by pace, landmark by landmark, mile by mile. They estimated, calculated, compared, recalculated, and proceeded on, assembling their mental maps. Imagine all the ways in which their basic perceptions of time and distance and direction differed from those we might experience while traveling: how the captains' sense of time and distance must have gotten all out of whack every now and then, just like ours does if we travel between familiar points but at speeds different from those we're accustomed to.

How different must be the perceptions of time and distance of an astronaut orbiting the earth several times, or the modern air traveler flying from New York to Australia in about the same time required for those several earth orbits, from those of Lewis and Clark struggling a few dozen miles up the Missouri River during the period required for several shuttle orbits or a jet flight halfway around the world.

Imagine the difference in ease of the calculations we obtain instantaneously from a handheld GPS device, those that an astronaut obtains after a supercomputer processes billions of pieces of information, and those that Lewis and Clark made in bad weather, at night, by firelight, with a crow quill pen in an elkskin-bound book. Think what a feat it was for Lewis and Clark just to keep track of the right day of the week (don't you ever lose track while you're on vacation?).

The mental maps the captains acquired so laboriously quickly became real ones, penned on paper and then engraved on copper plate. How close their mental maps and their actual maps must have been! Although the real maps available to us are supremely accurate, our mental maps are not. We cross landscapes not by the windings of rivers but by the straight lines of interstate highways. We follow not the local curvature of the terrain but the global curvature of the earth, again in apparent straight lines that mark the great circle airline routes between the country's and the world's airline hubs.

The sense of place and space with which we come away from our travels is quite different from that of Lewis and Clark: the smell of gasoline and diesel fumes rather than that of wood smoke; the haze of city and suburban pollution rather than the clarity of the High Plains at sunrise; the accumulation of airport destinations as experiences rather than the numerous nightly camps along the great Missouri; a fast-food "happy meal" instead of buffalo hump rib.

Even along the Lewis and Clark Trail, the modern traveler's experience cannot be like that of the Corps of Discovery: a few days in canoes through the Missouri's White Cliffs country or a few days on horseback in the Bitterroot Mountains cannot add up to the incremental experiences and mental maps of 28 months from St. Louis to the Pacific and back again.

--John Logan Allen