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

faddish road rallies held in the mid-1960s by clubs like the Chicago-based Concours Plains Rallye Team, of which Jim was a member. These sports car buffs weren’t racing for speed, as they do at Monte Carlo. In these “TSD” (time-speed-distance) rallies, teams navigated a complicated set of driving directions on public roads at preset speeds, with the aim of passing a series of checkpoints at the precise seconds required. During the long midwestern winters, when icy roads left the drivers housebound, someone suggested a map-based version of a road rally, and in 1964 the first Massacre was held. Jim took the event over in 1968 and in 1980 quit his chemical engineering job to run the contests full-time.
    Just as it was then, Massacre HQ is still the Sinclairs’ sixties-era rambler just north of Pasadena. It’s a rainy, misty day in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains when Jim and his wife, Sue, invite me inside to what I can immediately see is a grandparents’ house straight out of central casting: public radio classical music playing quietly somewhere, shelves lined with Garrison Keillor and Agatha Christie hardcovers, grandkid photos on every flat surface. The only differenceis Jim’s home office, which has metastasized to cover the whole living room. The pool table is now piled deep with boxes, envelopes, and stacks of reference books. “We have paper boxes for end tables now,” sighs Sue, who sits across from us on the plaid sofa, near her quilting basket.
    “I liken the Massacre to skiing, in that when somebody tries it, they’ll either get it right away and like it, or they’ll say, ‘What’s this for?’” says Jim. He’s a serious, professorial-looking man in his late sixties with white whiskers and a deep, gruff voice. “I’ve given up feeling that anybody would like it, because I know that most people don’t have that kind of mind.”
    I know that Jim means that not just anybody can get into his contests, but you could be forgiven for wondering if he meant that not anybody is capable of understanding them. See, map rallying is a strange and byzantine pursuit, even harder to describe than it is to master. As a kid, I would see regular ads for the Massacre in Games magazine, and I imagined the event as a freewheeling scavenger hunt through the atlas—exactly the kind of thing I would have loved at that age, though I never actually signed up. The reality of the event, I see as Jim and I peruse last year’s contest booklet, is very different.
    Here’s a sample step from the third of the rally’s eight legs, this one between Paris, Ontario, and Eden Park, Ohio:
8. After having gone through U.S. 24 shield on page 51 , turn on highway whose number comprises two digits and that is upon a limited-access highway in the direction that’s toward nearest other unnumbered interchange.
    If you can parse and negotiate that instruction correctly, you must then answer a multiple-choice question about your chosen route:
Q27. Which among these do you see first?
a. Bowling Green
b. Ohio Tpk.
c. Pemberville
d. Scotch Ridge
    Questions like these are the equivalent of the manned checkpoints at a real road rally: they test whether or not you’ve followed the course successfully. Jim and his collaborators cleverly “fail-safe” each step of the way, so that even when you miss a turn or a trick, you generally get looped back onto the correct route without ever realizing your misstep.
    The devious traps built into each step typically rely, in equal parts, on careful observation and hair-splitting interpretation of the contest’s rules. You might think a “road” is the same as a “named highway,” for example, but not in the Massacre: here, they’re very different. (A road is the line on the map, and it may carry one named highway, like “Interstate 25” or “Iowa 42,” along its path, or several at the same time, or none at all.) “Course following”—how to navigate the road between the end of one