<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If the above title supplies you with another earworm, it was a purely intentional act on my part.\u00a0 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 (<\/span>Tales From Topographic Oceans<\/span><\/i>).\u00a0 Somewhere back in the <\/span>FTV <\/span><\/i>archives there is an article discussing my long time love affair with maps.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 When I discovered an even deeper well of all things \u2018mappy\u2019, Geography became my field of choice.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The undergraduate work we did in Northern Michigan University\u2019s Department of Geography, Earth Science, and Conservation included a Cartography class taught by my up the street neighbor Pat Farrell.\u00a0 Some bemoaned that our noon to 3 p.m. Cartography Lab session was scheduled for Fridays, but I loved it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I knew him from my brother\u2019s Sports Car Club so I am not using the \u2018hippie dippy\u2019 description in a derogatory way.\u00a0 He would say, \u201cHey man, I gotta split – you mind locking up if you decide to go home?\u201d\u00a0 At least he didn\u2019t ask me to lock the building up on the way out.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Much of our mapping work was based on United States Geographical Survey (USGS) topographic maps and this was almost a decade before \u2018computer mapping\u2019 would become the next trend in the field.\u00a0 The use of these maps infiltrated my college classes in Dendrology, Geology, Biology, and Geomorphology.\u00a0 By the time I graduated in the spring of 1975, I must have thought I was some sort of map expert.\u00a0 I decided to not start taking classes right away and took the summer of 1976 off.\u00a0 I went to see my old mentor Pat the next spring to start planning my path to a Master of Arts degree in Geography.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There were a couple of education type classes on the \u2018must take\u2019 list so I was able to polish them off during the summer of 1977.\u00a0 Pat had suggested I take a field class calledc Biophysical Mapping taught by one of the new professors.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The first day of class, he asked the five of us to introduce ourselves and explain why we were taking the class.\u00a0 When I mentioned I was teaching seventh grade Geography \/ Earth Science in Ontonagon, he said quite abruptly, \u201cYou should drop this class and take something else.\u201d\u00a0 This was not the welcome I expected, but my response was direct and to the point:\u00a0 \u201cPat 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.\u201d\u00a0 The prof blinked a couple of times (perhaps he had never had a \u2018mere student\u2019, let alone a JH teacher disagree with him).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Nothing more was said and I enjoyed the class very much.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If there was, a map of these tree species would also map the soil types present.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 We stopped at a small tree plantation by the side of the road.\u00a0 He was explaining, \u201cThis type of Spruce will grow on this type of soil,\u201d as we examined the shallow pit he had dug.\u00a0 \u201cAh, Steve?\u201d I ventured as gently as I could, \u201cThat is a Jack Pine, not a Spruce.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhat makes you say that?\u201d he inquired.\u00a0 \u201cThe curved needles in pairs, the bark, and the paired cones that curve back toward the branch.\u201d\u00a0 He dug out his tree ID book, paged to Jack Pine, looked up and down a couple of times and finally said, \u201cOkay, my mistake.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A fellow student (and also a HS teacher) in the group hopped in my truck on the way to the next stop and asked, \u201cMan, are you trying to flunk this class?\u201d\u00a0 He was kidding, but it would not have been in my character to nod along when I knew the professor was wrong.\u00a0 At the next stop, he had his hand on the branch of a smallish tree he described as a type of Willow.\u00a0 Yes, you can guess what the next exchange sounded like:\u00a0 \u201cSteve, that is a Pin Cherry.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhat makes you say that?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWell, the long pointed leaves with serrations, the reddish bark, and the groups of Pin Cherries hanging off the branches a little higher up.\u201d\u00a0 He let out a deep sigh and said, \u201cI will take your word for it.\u00a0 Looks like tree identification won\u2019t be a problem for this group.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0While 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.\u00a0 This parcel had been deeded to the university so Pat thought it would be a good idea to do a detailed resource study.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After a couple of misses, he would point out our problem:\u00a0 \u201cYou guys know how to read a map, but what you don\u2019t do is pay attention to the terrain you are moving through.\u00a0 Once you can picture what is around you and see it in the lines on the map, you will never get lost again.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It was as humbling to me to learn I was not such a \u2018map expert\u2019 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.\u00a0 The class may have been about \u2018Biophysical Mapping\u2019 but I learned a lot about the practical applications of topographic maps from someone who was truly an expert.\u00a0 By the third week, we knew there was something wrong because all of our test holes were showing only one type of soil.\u00a0 In this area of glacially deposited soils, we knew there should be more variety.\u00a0 A quick visit to a former NMU student working at the county Soil Conservation Office fixed the problem for us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Steve had told us we needed to sample down to 48 inches below the surface.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Chalk 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\u2019t see the big picture.\u00a0 For the record, Steve\u2019s field work in Montana showed that soil mapping could be done from aerial photographs.\u00a0 If there was a certain kind of pine growing, it matched up with one particular soil.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 A couple of years later, Steve moved on to another university.\u00a0 I have never found any record of the survey work we did that summer, but no doubt it is sitting in an archive somewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As the student population in Ontonagon began to drop in the late 1970s, I was laid off for the 1979-80 school year.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 When I was offered a piecemeal schedule of classes not in my field to stay in Ontongaon, I took a leave of absence instead.\u00a0 This allowed me to finish my MA work while leaving the door ajar for me to return to Ontonagon \u2018if the economic situation stabilized\u2019.\u00a0 During this year back at NMU I was hired to be the Map Librarian in the Geography Department for 20 hours per week.\u00a0 This put me in charge of 250,000 declassified Department of the Army maps that were housed in the\u00a0 department Map Library (my office).\u00a0 These were available for public use but working with them only took up about ten percent of my time.\u00a0 The rest of my job involved inventory, stocking, and selling all of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) maps available for the Upper Peninsula.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The United States Geological Survey was established in 1879 by President Rutherford. B. Hayes.\u00a0 From 1881 to 1894, the Survey\u2019s second director, John Wesley Powell, expanded the agency\u2019s legacy of mapping.\u00a0 Powell is widely remembered as the first person to travel the length of the Colorado River and record observations from inside the Grand Canyon.\u00a0 Congress further authorized the systematic topographic mapping of the country in 1884.\u00a0 The \u2018systematic\u2019 part is significant because it ensured that the maps would use common scales, symbology, and schemes to make them easy for anyone to interpret.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 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.\u00a0 These typically covered all of Ontonagon County and as much of the Upper Peninsula as I could manage.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The USGS maps are used by both civilians and government agencies.\u00a0 When alarms would sound about \u2018government inefficiency\u2019 (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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I had the pleasure of selling maps to people who would show up at my office door.\u00a0 Often,I\u00a0 ended up\u00a0 mailing them to people in far flung places.\u00a0 If someone was in a hurry because they had a time crunch for, say, a building project, I would tell them, \u201cThe maps and postage will cost this, please send me a check as soon as possible,\u201d and I would send them what they needed.\u00a0 Pat would stick his head in the door and laughingly ask, \u201cHow many maps did you give away this week?\u201d\u00a0 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!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Dare I say map users are generally good people?<\/span><\/p>\n