If you’ve read Paper Towns , John Green’s 2008 runaway bestseller for young adults, you’ll know not to take maps too seriously. The novel had mention of a place called Agloe in New York, U.S., which reportedly figured on many maps till recently. In 2014, as reported by The New York Times, Google scraped off mention of the town from its maps because, well, Agloe did not exist. This was what is called a copyright trap — in this instance, a non-existent place was put on a map by a map maker, the General Drafting Company (GDC), to catch plagiarisers.
The shifting nature of a place
In his book, Beyond the Map: Unruly Enclaves, Ghostly Places, Emerging Lands and Our Search for New Utopias , Alastair Bonnett, a professor of social geography, revisits Green’s recap about Agloe — curiously, he spells it “Algoe”, perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the mystery of the place. Some years ago, another publisher put Agloe on its map, and when it was charged with copyright infringement, in its own defence it pointed to a general store named Agloe at that very spot. Further inquiry revealed that the store owners had, in turn, named their business after spotting Agloe on a GDC map at those coordinates.
But it’s not just towns. Evidently, and exaggeratedly, the iconic London A-Z map book is strewn with trap streets — streets that do not, in fact, exist — whether deliberately (according to trap-street explorers) or by mistake (Bonnett’s more forgiving hunch). It’s enough to inspire you to throw yourself into your immediate environs, map in hand, to find places which do not exist!
Bonnett’s larger endeavour, however, is to stick with actual places on the map but which have “something to tell us about the shifting nature of place and place-making”. Taken together, his is as much a kind of “39 places to see before you die” tour as it is a guide to reimagining places you may visit or have visited in the course of your own travels.
For example, there are the tsunami stones of Japan. Over the years they have appeared on various points of the shorelines to warn others to keep themselves safe from places where a tsunami has hit, with messages such as “do not build below this point”. Interest in these stones has been revived after the March 11, 2011 (or 3/11) big wave and earthquake that left almost 19,000 people dead or missing. Bonnett notes that in some places local residents say that older stones helped them escape ruination on 3/11.
The messages on the stones bear the imprints of passing time: “The oldest contain Buddhist teachings… Later ones show a Shinto influence. About 120 years ago the stones’ messages began to take on an earnestly practical tone; such as, ‘if there is an earthquake, think only of yourself and run to high ground’. After 3/11 the National General Association for Stone Shops in Japan erected 500 new coastal stone monuments, similar in look to the old tsunami stones but with an English translation and QR (Quick Response) codes that link to information about the 2011 disaster.” The question Bonnett poses is, how do we channelise this concept to issue warnings to future generations about potentially disastrous zones, such as dumping grounds for nuclear waste that needs to remain sealed off for thousands of years? He quotes the head of a “memory division” at the French nuclear agency saying, “How do you write a message that lasts for thousands of years? What language do you use? What do you even say?”
Going to unnerving zones
In Japan itself, Bonnett leads us to another “ghostly place” that brings to mind any number of novels by Haruki Murakami: the Shinjuku train station in Tokyo, which four million people pass through every day, with many levels, 200 exits and 36 platforms. Writes Bonnett: “Sometimes called the Bermuda Triangle of Tokyo, the story goes that some commuters never make it home. They take a wrong turn, then another, get flustered, run down the wrong stairs and end up in the wrong elevator, until they find themselves quite alone in a quiet corridor, the soft boom of a distant underground train sounding somewhere far above them. They are never seen again.” He searches for the quietest, most unnerving “interzone” in the “meeting ground between the station and giant shopping complex that engulfs it”. He finds that while “getting lost confronts us with our own insubstantiality... it is a difficult thing to do on purpose.” But the otherworldliness of the experience does come through, a place where you don’t disappear but will for just a while go off the grid.
Try finding such a place on a map during your summer travels, actual or armchair.
