FTV: Tales from Topographic Oceans

 

     If the above title supplies you with another earworm, it was a purely intentional act on my part.  When my old NASA Traveling Roadshow presenter (Ralph Winrich by name) sent me a recent link about the new and improved topographic maps available (more on them in a bit), my mind went right to the 1973 Yes album that I (sort of) borrowed for this title (Tales From Topographic Oceans).  Somewhere back in the FTV archives there is an article discussing my long time love affair with maps.  The maps found in our History books with all their squiggly battle lines and troop movements had me leaning toward a career as a History teacher.  When I discovered an even deeper well of all things ‘mappy’, Geography became my field of choice.

     The undergraduate work we did in Northern Michigan University’s Department of Geography, Earth Science, and Conservation included a Cartography class taught by my up the street neighbor Pat Farrell.  Some bemoaned that our noon to 3 p.m. Cartography Lab session was scheduled for Fridays, but I loved it.  By the time everybody started drifting toward the door at 2:30, I was usually so engrossed in what we were doing I often found myself the last one turning off the lights on the way out.  We had a kind of hippie – dippy graduate student in charge of the lab (okay, another borrowed term, this one from George Carlin) who was supposed to lock up.  I knew him from my brother’s Sports Car Club so I am not using the ‘hippie dippy’ description in a derogatory way.  He would say, “Hey man, I gotta split – you mind locking up if you decide to go home?”  At least he didn’t ask me to lock the building up on the way out.

     Much of our mapping work was based on United States Geographical Survey (USGS) topographic maps and this was almost a decade before ‘computer mapping’ would become the next trend in the field.  The use of these maps infiltrated my college classes in Dendrology, Geology, Biology, and Geomorphology.  By the time I graduated in the spring of 1975, I must have thought I was some sort of map expert.  I decided to not start taking classes right away and took the summer of 1976 off.  I went to see my old mentor Pat the next spring to start planning my path to a Master of Arts degree in Geography.  The State of Michigan required teachers to get 18 credits within the first five years of teaching so a provisional teaching certificate could be elevated to a permanent one.  As long as most MA programs took 30 credits to complete, it made sense to go in with a plan that led to an MA degree and not just take a few willy nilly classes to meet the bare bones state requirements.

     There were a couple of education type classes on the ‘must take’ list so I was able to polish them off during the summer of 1977.  Pat had suggested I take a field class calledc Biophysical Mapping taught by one of the new professors.  The prof in charge did his PhD thesis in this very field in Montana so the Geography Department at NMU thought he was the ideal candidate to put together a class in his specialty area.  The first day of class, he asked the five of us to introduce ourselves and explain why we were taking the class.  When I mentioned I was teaching seventh grade Geography / Earth Science in Ontonagon, he said quite abruptly, “You should drop this class and take something else.”  This was not the welcome I expected, but my response was direct and to the point:  “Pat Farrell is my advisor, I have worked at the Field Station for Pat and if he tells me this is a class I should be in, I am not going anywhere.”  The prof blinked a couple of times (perhaps he had never had a ‘mere student’, let alone a JH teacher disagree with him).  

     Nothing more was said and I enjoyed the class very much.  We were going to study the species of trees growing on a plot of land to see if there was a direct correlation with the type of soil they were growing in.  If there was, a map of these tree species would also map the soil types present.  I wasn’t looking for payback, but the first time the prof took us out in the field to show us how we were to collect tree and soil data, I ended up introducing him to Dendrology (study of trees), Upper Peninsula style.  We stopped at a small tree plantation by the side of the road.  He was explaining, “This type of Spruce will grow on this type of soil,” as we examined the shallow pit he had dug.  “Ah, Steve?” I ventured as gently as I could, “That is a Jack Pine, not a Spruce.”  “What makes you say that?” he inquired.  “The curved needles in pairs, the bark, and the paired cones that curve back toward the branch.”  He dug out his tree ID book, paged to Jack Pine, looked up and down a couple of times and finally said, “Okay, my mistake.”

     A fellow student (and also a HS teacher) in the group hopped in my truck on the way to the next stop and asked, “Man, are you trying to flunk this class?”  He was kidding, but it would not have been in my character to nod along when I knew the professor was wrong.  At the next stop, he had his hand on the branch of a smallish tree he described as a type of Willow.  Yes, you can guess what the next exchange sounded like:  “Steve, that is a Pin Cherry.”  “What makes you say that?”  “Well, the long pointed leaves with serrations, the reddish bark, and the groups of Pin Cherries hanging off the branches a little higher up.”  He let out a deep sigh and said, “I will take your word for it.  Looks like tree identification won’t be a problem for this group.”

     While this was an amusing side to the class, I got my own education when we started taking soil samples and plotting tree species on a parcel of land located northeast of the area on County Road 553 known as the Crossroads.  This parcel had been deeded to the university so Pat thought it would be a good idea to do a detailed resource study.  We were given a USGS topographic map of the area and we spent the better part of two weeks going crosscountry and plotting out where we were taking samples.  There was a retired Army Captain in our group and I have the distinct feeling he was used to working with younger guys who thought they knew it all.  He had the keys to the car (his VW microbus) and when we wrapped up for the day, he would challenge us know-it-all Geography majors to get us back to where we had parked.  We would look at the map and point out where we thought we needed to go and 9 times out of 10, we were dead wrong.  After a couple of misses, he would point out our problem:  “You guys know how to read a map, but what you don’t do is pay attention to the terrain you are moving through.  Once you can picture what is around you and see it in the lines on the map, you will never get lost again.”

     It was as humbling to me to learn I was not such a ‘map expert’ as it was for Steve the prof to find out the tree species he had worked with in Montana were not the same as those in the U.P.  The class may have been about ‘Biophysical Mapping’ but I learned a lot about the practical applications of topographic maps from someone who was truly an expert.  By the third week, we knew there was something wrong because all of our test holes were showing only one type of soil.  In this area of glacially deposited soils, we knew there should be more variety.  A quick visit to a former NMU student working at the county Soil Conservation Office fixed the problem for us. 

    Steve had told us we needed to sample down to 48 inches below the surface.  It turned out the area we were studying had three main soil types that were identical and the only way to tell them apart was to examine what sediments were like between 50 and 60 inches deep.  We would need to visit every one of the holes we had tested and dig deeper but with the time we had left in the six week course, we had to settle for re-testing one out of every three holes.  Finding them was much easier after our master class in map reading and I think Steve was impressed that we went back and corrected our data without him having to tell us to do so.  

     Chalk one up for the wisdom gained by our little crew of graduate students vs the lowly undergrads (that we once were) who knew the basics but didn’t see the big picture.  For the record, Steve’s field work in Montana showed that soil mapping could be done from aerial photographs.  If there was a certain kind of pine growing, it matched up with one particular soil.  I do not know a lot about the glacial history of Montana, but I do know that the soils left behind in our neck of the woods after the last Ice Age are sometimes a jumbled mess.  A couple of years later, Steve moved on to another university.  I have never found any record of the survey work we did that summer, but no doubt it is sitting in an archive somewhere.

     As the student population in Ontonagon began to drop in the late 1970s, I was laid off for the 1979-80 school year.  I enrolled in classes for the fall semester and with my new wife already working at Marquette General Hospital, we had a plan for our first year of married life.  When I was offered a piecemeal schedule of classes not in my field to stay in Ontongaon, I took a leave of absence instead.  This allowed me to finish my MA work while leaving the door ajar for me to return to Ontonagon ‘if the economic situation stabilized’.  During this year back at NMU I was hired to be the Map Librarian in the Geography Department for 20 hours per week.  This put me in charge of 250,000 declassified Department of the Army maps that were housed in the  department Map Library (my office).  These were available for public use but working with them only took up about ten percent of my time.  The rest of my job involved inventory, stocking, and selling all of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) maps available for the Upper Peninsula.  If the Biophysical Mapping class had been the trigger for me to up my map reading skills, the job as the Map Librarian ended up being a PhD course in everything one would need to know about the USGS and their extensive mapping operations.

     The United States Geological Survey was established in 1879 by President Rutherford. B. Hayes.  From 1881 to 1894, the Survey’s second director, John Wesley Powell, expanded the agency’s legacy of mapping.  Powell is widely remembered as the first person to travel the length of the Colorado River and record observations from inside the Grand Canyon.  Congress further authorized the systematic topographic mapping of the country in 1884.  The ‘systematic’ part is significant because it ensured that the maps would use common scales, symbology, and schemes to make them easy for anyone to interpret.  In more recent times, if one had the wall space, the entire United States could be pieced together into one giant map using these features of continuity. 

    In my own classroom(s), I always asked the custodians to hang multiple 4 X 8 foot particle boards on the walls so I could make large composites.  These typically covered all of Ontonagon County and as much of the Upper Peninsula as I could manage.  By 1992, the entire contiguous United States had been mapped at a 1:24000 scale (roughly translating as 1 inch equals a quarter of a mile).  Maps of this scale have become the most widely used USGS maps second to the 1:62,500 scale maps (where 1 inch equals about 1 mile).  I used maps of both scales as well as 1:250,000 scale maps in my classes (these cover the entire U.P. with only a couple of maps).

     The USGS maps are used by both civilians and government agencies.  When alarms would sound about ‘government inefficiency’ (as they seem to do every decade or so), I would get on my soapbox and explain to my classes that the USGS provides more bang for the buck than some agencies.  If the role of mapping the country had been left up to private companies, the maps would not have been available to the general public at the reasonable cost they were sold.  I had the pleasure of selling maps to people who would show up at my office door.  Often,I  ended up  mailing them to people in far flung places.  If someone was in a hurry because they had a time crunch for, say, a building project, I would tell them, “The maps and postage will cost this, please send me a check as soon as possible,” and I would send them what they needed.  Pat would stick his head in the door and laughingly ask, “How many maps did you give away this week?”  I was proud to announce that not one person I mailed maps to in this manner stiffed me, which was a good thing because I would have had to pay for them!  On the other side of the coin, I got to learn about places like Raco, Michigan (where one gentleman was in the process of buying property) and Delaware, Michigan where a couple planned to go hunting for old copper mines.  Dare I say map users are generally good people?

     This whole article about mapping adventures started with Ralph when he sent me the following link:  https://topobuilder.nationalmap.gov/ .   I have used online topographic maps in the past and there are dozens of companies (besides the USGS) that will sell you digital and hard copies.  They are a bit more expensive than the 75 cents we charged per sheet back in 1979, but they are still a great deal for the information they provide.  I won’t give you the whole sales pitch for this site, but it seems that we have now moved into slightly different (map) territory.  This site allows one to customize a map to meet specific needs – all at no charge.  Hiking, biking, canoeing, or (name your favorite outdoor activity here), this site will have something for you.

     When I returned to my teaching job in the fall of 1980, I began collecting as many of the USGS maps as I could on my limited budget.  It seems the maps I had used for the previous four years had all found new homes when I was back at NMU.  They were still cheap enough, but I needed classroom quantities.  It also helped to find out the Intermediate School District office in Bergland had a laminating machine.  For a small fee, I had all of my maps laminated so no amount of class use would require me to replace them every year.  Having kids explore their home areas and learn how to read the ‘shape’ of the land from the contour lines was, in my mind, a useful skill for those of us living on the edge of the wilderness.  Showing students how to find and describe property with the Township and Range system used for legal land descriptions in the United States might not pay dividends right away.  They might not use these skills until they  were old enough to buy their own land, but maybe they could help others who were not up on the system.

     The first year we began training the eighth graders how to navigate crosscountry using maps and compasses, they were given another tool in their arsenal of ‘other map uses’.  Having our several week long mapping unit end with a literal ‘field test’ of their skills took the lessons from the classroom out into the real world.  This exercise began at the Lake of the Clouds parking lot in the Porcupine Mountain Wilderness State Park.  We used maps and compass bearings to find a small hill NW of the parking lot where we would meet for lunch before following different routes back to the bus.

     We always arranged these orienteering hikes so each group of students was accompanied by a couple of older students and an adult.  The rules of thumb were, “Let them follow the bearings they had figured out in class.  Everyone takes a turn leading the group.  If the group does not like the direction they are going, they need to speak up, and last but not least, if they manage to get turned around in the woods (and it happened from time to time), help them work out the solution to get back on the right track.” 

    The ‘adults in the room’ were there for safety reasons and to make sure a ‘lost’ group didn’t really become ‘lost’.  In fact, we didn’t use that term.  We referred to the groups who did not make it to the lunch hill as being ‘misplaced’.  When we did the post-trip wrap up, some of the most interesting (and perhaps useful) lessons came from the groups recounting what they did wrong and how they found their way back to civilization.  In these days of GPS, some see maps as irrelevant, but as an old paper map guy, I would rather know how to use both GPS and topographic maps – you can never have enough mapping tools on your belt. 

Top Piece Video:  Rick Wakeman talks about the above mentioned Yes album, Tales from Topographic Oceans