Daily GPS tracks, logged
from the Eden Walk Out, travel 24,000 miles around the world along the paths of
our Stone Age ancestors, with stories disguised as maps.
The ruler-straight sections of the Walking Trail, for example, suggest sluggish slogans along inhuman car roads.
Sharp turns or curves,
such as kinks in the garden hose, usually indicate interesting encounters.
Thick-looking tracks point at the footpaths that scorch the muscles, or at
steep cliffs or mountain ranges. (See a map of when authorities stopped Paul
Salopek's story Odyssey.)
A sudden right angle
indicates an encounter with a fence or mine. But what about the dense clamp of
GPS data? Soulless dead-end? behind? The path that resembles a spaghetti clot?
Such doodles often
indicate an unexpected nap in the journey: a quickie of the landscape (such as
the yo-yo ridgeline of northeast India), a dangerous anecdote (being driven out
of a Kurdish village in Turkey), or the whole, By the way, a knot of confusion
(is looking) for a stolen water cache in Uzbekistan). So: Welcome to the kink
map.
It Works Like This
My walking path from
Africa to South America is being accurately logged for archival purposes, via a pocket-sized GPS device that slips off my neck on a boot. This small machine
receives a steady stream of signals from satellites orbiting 22,236 miles above
the Earth.
The GPS device converts
these signals into precise latitude and longitude locations using a process
called triplication. This information is put into a digital map - a giant
canvas - nurtured by the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis mapmaker Jeff
Blossom. Jeff identified the curious kink in my trail. (No easy task: I have
covered about 11,000 miles so far, or have travelled more than 20 million
through 1. countries.) And I do every dirty GPS doodle through my magazines,
erratically Curve, try to identify the cause of a sharp graph or retreat.
So come join us. We will update the kicks map from time to time.
Reviewed by Mr Stan
on
January 30, 2021
Rating: