Essay No. 2
Trap Streets
On a town that existed because a map said so, and on the smaller, kinder lies that every honest map has to tell.
For about twenty years, whenever I told somebody at a party that I made maps for a living, there was a reasonable chance they would lean in and ask whether it was true that we put fake streets on them to catch people copying.
I always said no. It is the answer I would have given either way, which I think they understood, and which is why they always looked so pleased.
The idea is real enough. A trap street is a feature that does not exist, a cul-de-sac, a little bend in a road, a pond, inserted into a map so that if it turns up on somebody else’s map you know where they got it from. Mapmakers have a long and not entirely noble history of copying each other, and a long and entirely understandable history of being annoyed about it. The best traps are tiny and plausible. Nobody will ever drive down them, because there is nowhere for them to go.1Dictionaries do the same thing with invented words, which lexicographers call mountweazels. I find it charming that the word for a fake entry is itself a fake entry’s name.
The most famous of them is a town.
The story goes like this, and I should say at the start that it is told in several versions, and I have no way of checking which is right, which seems appropriate.
In the 1930s, two men at a company called General Drafting were making a road map of New York State for Esso. Somewhere in the Catskills, at a junction of two dirt roads with nothing at it at all, they put a dot and a name: Agloe. The name was made out of their initials, scrambled. It was a trap. If Agloe ever showed up on a rival’s map, they would know.
A few years later it did. General Drafting went to the rival, ready for a fight, and the rival said, in effect: but Agloe is real. And it was. Somebody had built a general store at that junction, and, finding that the map said they were in Agloe, had called it the Agloe General Store. The county had a record of the place. The lie had come true because somebody believed it enough to stand in it.
I have thought about the shopkeeper a great deal. You look at a map, and it tells you that the empty crossroads where you have decided to sell petrol and bread and fishing tackle has a name, and the name is not one you’ve heard before, and you do not think this map is wrong. You think well, then. You paint the sign. There are worse ways to make a place. Most places, if you go back far enough, were made by somebody deciding that they were.
I said no at parties because, as far as I ever knew, the Survey did not do it. But I didn’t tell them the other thing, which is that every map is full of lies, and that a great deal of my working life was spent telling them carefully.
Take a road. On a 1:50,000 sheet, an ordinary two-lane road is perhaps seven metres wide. Drawn to scale, it would be about a seventh of a millimetre across, thinner than a hair, and you would never see it. So we drew it wider, a millimetre or so, wide enough to read at arm’s length in a moving car. A millimetre on that sheet is fifty metres on the ground. Which means that, on the map, every road in the country is fifty metres wide, and anything standing beside it, a house, a pub, a church, has to be pushed aside to make room.
The word for this is displacement, and I have done a great deal of it. In my first year, on a sheet covering part of mid-Wales, I spent most of a Thursday moving a chapel a third of a millimetre to the left so that the road beside it could be drawn at the proper thickness. On the ground, the chapel would have moved about seventeen metres, into a field. It is still, in my opinion, the most impressive thing I can say at dinner.2The chapel is still there, I’m told, in its proper position, and so far as I know the congregation never noticed it had been moved.
Then there is selection: what to leave out. Not every gate, not every shed, not every footpath that a farmer’s dog has worn through a hedge. And simplification: the coastline that, if you followed every wrinkle, would never end, smoothed to a line you can actually draw. And exaggeration, and classification, and all the other little words in the manual for the ways a map is not quite the ground.
There is a story by Borges, a single paragraph long, about an empire whose cartographers became so skilled that they made a map of the empire the same size as the empire, which coincided with it point for point. The next generations found it useless, and left it out in the desert to rot, and in his telling you can still find tattered bits of it, sheltering animals and beggars.
That is the map with no lies in it. It is the territory. Nobody can use it.
So I don’t think the right question is whether a map lies. It is whether it lies on your behalf. The road is drawn too wide so you can find it. The chapel is moved so you can see it. The thousand small, true things are left out so that the few you need are visible. A good map is a kind of courtesy: somebody has walked the ground before you and decided, on your behalf, what you could do without.
A trap street is the opposite. It is a lie told for the mapmaker, not for you. It’s the only kind of map lie I ever found genuinely irritating, and I think that is why Agloe delights me so much. It is the one trap that turned. Somebody built a shop on the lie, and sold bread in it, and the lie became the most honest thing on the sheet.
The store closed long ago, and Agloe faded off the maps again, and I am told there is nothing at that junction now but trees. I have never been. I’m not sure I want to. I would like it to stay where it is, which is half on the ground and half on the paper, a small dot that was wrong and then was right and then was wrong again, at the meeting of two roads that go nowhere in particular.