Taking The World For Granted

When I was a kid my parents and I traveled to unknown places without leaving home. We didn't have much money for anything, let alone roaming the planet. But that didn't prevent us from finding destinations that we could visit in a virtual sense. Here's how we did it, and how you can do it, but how today there are still people living in remote areas of the world who couldn't even conceive of how it's done.

My parents and I played a game of chance. But unlike those games of chance at casinos in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, Atlantic City, or on Indian reservations in the U.S., this one did not involve money.

Back in the day, as they say, service stations (places where you bought gasoline and someone else pumped it into your car's gas tank for you, and then checked the level of the oil in your engine, coolant in the radiator, and air in the tires, all for free) gave away local and regional road maps. So we had a collection of maps for Washington (the state where we lived), Oregon, Idaho and California. These maps became our "game boards."

The rules of the game were simple. If it was your turn, you looked at the map, found an obscure town, and remembered its name. The other players had to guess where it was based on questions they asked and clues you gave.

It sounds like an easy game to play, but it was actually very difficult to win. But all of the players had one advantage: They knew the world was one big round ball and where continents, countries, and cities were located in relation to each other. But suppose you had no idea that anywhere other than your patch of ground existed, or even if you knew that the planet extended beyond your limited field of view, you could only envision other places in the same terms that defined your home?

I recently read and reviewed Peter Rudiak-Gould's book Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island. Peter spent a year teaching English to school children on the tiny island of Ujae in a remote part of the Marshall Islands. While all of the adults had been "off-island" and some had traveled to the mainland U.S., many of the children had roamed no farther than other parts of their atoll.

Ujae has an "ocean" side and an opposite "lagoon" side and the kids assumed that every place in the world was similarly delimited. Here are some of the questions that Peter's students posed to him about the United States:

• "So, in America, how far is it from the ocean side to the lagoon side?"
  
• "So how are the beaches in Arkansas?"
  
• "How long would it take in a boat [to go from California to Colorado]?"
  

Here's how the author-teacher summed up this geographic disconnect:

"How could I tell them that America was land but not an island, that it was a country but not an atoll? I received truly baffled looks when I told the children that America was not an island.

"It eventually struck me that it was perhaps I who was confused."

But at least the Marshallese children living on Ujae knew that other continents, countries, and cities existed even if they had never visited them. But would hunter-gatherers living in the 21^st century be blessed with even such limited knowledge of the world?

Michael Finkel answers that question in his story "The Hadza" in the December 2009 issue of National Geographic. Finkel stayed with the Hadza in northern Tanzania in East Africa. These bush people live today much as they would have 10,000 years ago. They do not travel to the outside world, although the outside world has begun to come to them. Here's Finkel's description of an informal "geography and world affairs lesson" he had with these people:

"[Onwas] knows everything there is to know about the bush and virtually nothing of the land beyond. One time I showed Onwas a map of the world. I spread it open on the dirt and anchored the corners with stones. A crowd gathered. Onwas stared. I pointed out the continent of Africa, then the country of Tanzania, then the region where he lived. I showed him the United States.

"I asked him what he knew about America—the name of the president, the capital city. He said he knew nothing. He could not name the leader of his own country. I asked him, as politely as possible, if he knew anything about any country. He paused for a moment, evidently deep in thought, then suddenly shouted, "London!" He couldn't say precisely what London was. He just knew it was someplace not in the bush." 

Unlike Peter Rudiak-Gould's school class and the Hadza of Tanzania, the world is our oyster and we take it for granted. In an hour's drive or less, I can reach San Francisco International Airport or its counterpart across San Francisco Bay in Oakland. From those two airports I can begin a journey that will take me to the Marshall Islands (although probably not easily to Ujae) or to Tanzania (although probably not easily to the land of the Hadza) or virtually anywhere else my heart desires. Using a globe, an atlas, a road map, or the Internet, I can now find any place on Planet Earth with even greater ease than I could fifty-odd years ago when I played the map game with my parents.

If you've traveled in person, or just book in hand sitting in an armchair, to a place where people don't take the world for granted, put your thoughts in a "Comment" to this post.