Places That Aren’t There

Map showing the Wessex of Thomas Hardy’s novels.

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

There are places that we have heard of, read about, and perhaps even seen on a map, but they don’t exist. Or, at least, they don’t exist in the world we walk through today.

These places appeal to me. You are reading now about a place called Paradelle that exists online but cannot be found (yet!) on maps. Maps and imaginary places have fascinated me since I was a kid. It started with places in novels (like Treasure Island) which led me to love maps, which led me to draw maps and write about my own imaginary places.

When I was teaching middle school, I had my students create maps of the fictional settings of novels they read. Even if the setting was a “real” place or based on a real place, the maps needed things that you wouldn’t find on existing maps – the empty lot or the church that burns down in The Outsiders; the roads and ranches in Of Mice and Men; Scout Finch’s hometown and Boo’s tree in To Kill a Mockingbird or where Romeo, Juliet, Benvolio or Friar Lawrence lived in Shakespeare’s play.

I started a novel years ago that was set in Camptown, New Jersey. That is a town that did exist on maps at one time. It changed its name to Irvington. But my Camptown is a blended town that mixed my hometown of Irvington with other places I have lived along with things I wish were included in the place where I live. The river that runs through the town is all the rivers and creeks and streams I have known. It is the Elizabeth River that I knew as a boy, the Peckman River that runs through where I now live and the Passaic River. That river cuts across New Jersey and is sourced from a now-swampy glacial lake that dinosaurs edged up to for a drink. It spills spectacularly over the Great Falls in Paterson and on to Newark Bay, New York Harbor, the Hudson River and out to the Atlantic Ocean.  As I wandered along riverbanks and paths such as the Lenape trails around me as a child and adult, stories were always coming to me from the past.

All this came to mind back in 2015 when I saw ads for the film Paper Towns which is based on a novel by John Green.  You’ll see the novel and maybe even the film labeled as for “young adults” but that is a term I never liked. Are Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird young adult novels just because they are often read by young adults? Green is a very popular novelist among teenagers, but a lot of adults know his writing either from his book, The Fault in Our Stars, or the film version of his book. John Green tweeted “Celebrating the release of #papertowns with a road trip to a place that wasn’t, then was, then wasn’t, and now…is?”

In that novel, the character Quentin loves, loses and searches for Margo.  Clues lead Q to believe that Margo may be possibly hiding out (or buried) in one of the many abandoned subdivision projects (also known as “pseudovisions”) around Orlando, Florida. Those turn out to be dead ends, but he does find a map in an abandoned strip mall which he then connects with another map he made in an attempt to locate her. He matches up the holes from the pushpins in the mall map to his map and this leads him to believe that she is hiding in Agloe, New York.  He and some friends skip graduation and head to Agloe to find her.

I read the novel and since I first wrote this post in 2015, I have seen the film. I liked both of them and it led me to dig deeper into these imagined towns.

Fictional “copyright trap” showing Agloe, New York. This is a real 1998 Esso state map of New York, United States.

The Agloe in the novel is/was a fictional place in Delaware County, New York, that became an actual landmark, if not a real town.

In the 1930s, two mapmakers (Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers) made an anagram of their initials and placed it as a town at the intersection of NY 206 and Morton Hill Road, north of the real town of Roscoe, New York.

Were they merry pranksters? No. The town was meant as a “copyright trap.” It turns out that mapmakers sometimes place a fictitious place on their maps so that if someone plagiarizes it, they have a way to easily check.

However, in the 1950s, a general store was built at that intersection and was named the Agloe General Store.

The fictional town appeared on Esso (now Exxon) gas station road maps that were widely distributed. Agloe appeared on a Rand McNally map and Esso threatened to sue Rand McNally for copyright infringement. But that never happened because Rand McNally pointed out that the place had now become “real” and therefore no infringement could be established.

That store went out of business, but Agloe continued to appear on maps until about 25 years ago when it was deleted.

But – update –  it appears in Google Maps and the very official United States Geological Survey which added “Agloe (Not Official)” to the Geographic Names Information System database in February 2014.

Places that aren’t there are nothing new and there are lots of examples.  There are the ones created by writers, such as Stephen King’s Castle Rock and Derry, Maine, and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. In my abandoned novel, I considered placing Camptown in the county of Wessex in New Jersey as the western portion of the real county of Essex.

There are also places created by mapmakers.  Besides the paper towns, another copyright-protection technique is to include a “trap street” on a map. This fictitious street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, has also been used as a way of trapping copyright violators. Alternatives are nonexistent towns, rivers or perhaps a mountain with the intentionally wrong elevation inserted for the same purpose. Of course, you don’t want to add something that confuses users or just looks like an unintentional mistake. The mapmaker may add nonexistent bends to a street, or depict a major street as a narrow lane, without changing its location or its connections to other streets.

Phantom settlements are settlements that appear on maps but do not actually exist. They can be accidents or copyright traps. Some examples are Argleton, Lancashire, UK and Beatosu and Goblu, Ohio, USA.

The Zeno map of 1558 shows Frisland – a phantom island in the North Atlantic

As a lover of islands, I have always had an interest in “phantom islands.”  They are islands that appeared on maps for a period of time (sometimes centuries) during recorded history, but were later removed after it was proven not to exist.

These are not copyright traps. They often came from reports of early sailors exploring new waters. Some were purely mythical, such as the Isle of Demons or Atlantis. Sometimes actual islands were mislocated or just a plain old mistake. The Baja California Peninsula appears on some early maps as an island but was later discovered to be attached to the mainland of North America. Some phantom islands were probably due to navigational errors, misidentification of icebergs, or optical illusions due to fog or poor conditions.

An interesting subset are islands that existed and were destroyed by volcanic explosions, earthquakes, submarine landslides, or rising waters and erosion. Pactolus Bank, visited by Sir Francis Drake, may fit into this category. It was discovered by Captain W.D. Burnham on the American ship Pactolus on November 6, 1885.

It has been postulated that this was the sunken location of Elizabeth Island, discovered by Sir Francis Drake’s ship the Golden Hinde in 1578. Drake anchored off an island which he named “Elizabeth Island,” (for Queen Elizabeth I) where wood and water were collected and seals and penguins were captured for food, along with “herbs of great virtue.” According to Drake’s pilot, their position at the anchorage was 57°S. However, no island has been confirmed at that latitude. A map was drawn by a priest that accompanied Drake, Francis Fletcher.

Elizabeth Island might be a good setting for another novel – or for my Paradelle.

Francis Fletcher’s map of Elizabeth Island

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In this video, John Green talks about finding Agloe on an old Esso road map

An Island Chapel

Early last year, I had read about a place in the Highlands of northern New Jersey that I wanted to visit when the warmer weather arrived. The weather did warm, but then COVID-19 arrived, so I never made it there.

The place is a chapel on a small island. Francis S. Kinney built St. Hubert’s Chapel from 1886-1889. It was so that his wife wouldn’t have to travel into Butler to the nearest church.

St. Hubert is the patron saint of the hunt.

The church was in use until the early 1950s when a larger church was built nearby. The Chapel was vandalized and is still being restored but is fully functional.

The Chapel has historical significance for several reasons including that it is believed to be one of the first fully-integrated ecclesiastical decorative schemes undertaken by the Tiffany Glass Company.

It was built in the style of an 8th-century stone chapel (which was the time of St. Hubert) and Louis Tiffany was commissioned to add the Celtic cross stained glass window and a Tiffany-signed mosaic floor among other features.

The chapel and Chapel Island is on Lake Kinnelon and is located within the town of Kinnelon which is named for the Kinney, who had the chapel built after he had purchased 5,000 acres of land there. But the chapel and island are not easy to access.

There is a community within Kinnelon called Smoke Rise which is administered by the Smoke Rise Club. To enter the community, you have to pass through one of the two gates and within are about 900 homes. The Chapel is owned by the Smoke Rise Club and it is a controlled-access, gated community. There are two manned gates and you must be a resident, a resident’s guest or be accompanied by a realtor to enter. The club at one time conducted tours of the chapel. Tours are currently not being offered.

Perhaps this year, when the weather warms and if the pandemic subsides, I’ll get to tour the chapel on the island.

Chapel Island on Lake Kinnelon – Image via Wikpedia

You can check for updates at kinnelonheritage.org  and see some of the history of St. Hubert’s Chapel and get a look inside virtually at some of its treasures in a documentary from the Kinnelon Heritage Conservation Society.

Photos via Google Maps by Cori Kline

Lost Worlds

I have updated an earlier post to reflect the recent release of a film, The Lost City of Z, based on Grann’s book of the same name. Both tell the true story of British explorer Percy Fawcett who went into the Amazon in 1925 with his son looking for an ancient lost city. They both disappeared. For decades, explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of his party and the Lost City of Z. Since then, perhaps another hundred people have died or disappeared searching for Fawcett.

I read David Grann’s The Lost City of Z in 2010 and halfway through it I realized what attracted me to it. It takes me back to a book of my youth – The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – which was a novel I loved as a kid.  I probably read the Classics Illustrated Comic version before I actually read the book. That was the case with many books from Treasure Island to Hamlet. The comics didn’t replace the originals; they led me to them.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is much better known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Even if you have never read any of his fiction, you probably know a few of his stories and characters because according to the Internet Movie Database there are at least 215 films based on his writing.

I took out my old comic book version and also my paperback of the novel and rediscovered Doyle’s little introductory verse:

I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.

There was another book titled The Lost World which was Michael Crichton’s sequel to Jurassic Park, but I have nothing to say about that book. To me, The Lost World is the one published in 1912 and it is the fictional story of an expedition to a place in the Amazon where prehistoric animals still survive. (Hmmm, did Mr. Crichton get inspiration for Jurassic Park from it?)  The book introduced the character Professor Challenger who appears in other books by Doyle.

Exploration and lost worlds captured the fancy of the public and authors in the early part of the 20th century. In 1916, Edgar Rice Burroughs (who is better known for his Tarzan and science-fiction stories) published The Land that Time Forgot, which was his version of a lost world story. In that rather ridiculous tale, sailors from a German U-Boat discover a world of dinosaurs and ape-men in Antarctica.

I read all of them. I didn’t really pay attention back then to the chronology of publication. If I had noted the dates, I would have realized that another one of my childhood author heroes, Jules Verne, had introduced the whole prehistoric-animals-in-the-present-day adventure story with his novel Journey to the Center of the Earth which was published back in 1864. Those explorers find a prehistoric world of people and dinosaurs inside the Earth.

By the way, you can read The Lost World as an “e-book” free online at Project Gutenberg – if you can handle reading on a screen. I can’t.

Now, to get back to where this post started, the setting for The Lost World was probably inspired by reports about British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett’s expedition to Venezuela and Brazil, in a mountain region called Mount Roraima.

The modern-day non-fiction book, The Lost City of Z , tells the tale of Fawcett who launched his final expedition in 1925 into the Amazon.

His goal was to find the fabled lost city of El Dorado, the “City of Gold.” El Dorado has captured the imaginations of kids, armchair explorers, and real anthropologists, adventurers, and scientists for about 400 years – even though there really has never been evidence that it ever existed. That hasn’t stopped hundreds of expeditions from going out looking for it.

Fawcett was financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London.  It humbles me to think that at age 57 he headed out again because he really believed in El Dorado, which he called the City of Z.

He set out with only his 21-year-old son Jack and one of Jack’s friends. He wanted to travel light and fast, eat off the land, and not harass the natives. They vanished in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil.  Subsequent attempts to find Fawcett and the city have failed.

What happened to Fawcett? David Grann thinks he knows. The author is not an adventurer, but he ended up in the jungles of the Amazon to try to find an answer.

Fawcett’s expeditions inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of a lost world. Grann wrote an earlier book, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.

I’m not ready for any Amazon adventures, so I’m happy to follow Grann’s digging through Fawcett’s old diaries and logs for clues and doing my own armchair adventuring.

I liked that the book also deals with how in the past 40 years in Brazil alone, the Amazon has lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover. That’s an area bigger than France. Tribes are being threatened with extinction. Many animals and plants, some we never even knew existed, are also vanishing.

Much has been lost in those jungles.

More Reading
Vanished!: Explorers Forever Lost     
The Lost City

X Marks the Spot

I suspect that Treasure Island, the adventure novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, is not much read these days. In my youth, it was one of the “classics” that teachers put on the acceptable reading list for book reports.

I’m not sure now if I read the novel or saw one of  the movie adaptations first (probably the 1950 Disney version). I definitely read the Classics Illustrated comic version. (A series that started me on many a classic work of fiction.)

It is probably still considered a book for young people, but I suspect the vocabulary and sentence structures of most of those classics would be a tough reading assignment for today’s young readers.

As a lover of islands and of maps, the book had both those elements going for it. I certainly didn’t think of it back then as a “coming-of-age” story and commentary on morality, though it’s that too. For me, and most readers, it is an adventure tale. Young Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver and the pirates seemed to live a pretty cool life.

Reading it today, a kid would think it ripped off all the many versions that have come since – some with the Treasure Island name, some with other names. But Stevenson was the original for many pirate standards such as a treasure map marked with an “X”, schooners and one-legged sailors with parrots on their shoulders.

But the map of the island fascinated me. The hardcover edition I read had a map as the inside covers and I studied it and copied it and then modified it. I made many treasure maps as a kid. Some were imaginary places. Some were my neighborhood places. Years later, I had my students make literary maps of novels we read in class.

Stevenson’s map

Robert Louis Stevenson was inspired for novel by a painting he had made while playing with his stepson.  In the introduction to one of the editions to the novel, he wrote:

“On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’ I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.”

He said that just staring at the map made the book “appear.” He could see characters, the woods, fights and hunting treasure, and he started outlining chapters.

 

I am still up for a treasure hunt, if anyone is interested.

A New Island

Niijima (NASA)

The Earth is still changing geologically, even though we commonly think of all those changes as something from the distant past.  Mountains and oceans are being created and destroyed and almost nothing is permanent.  Our little human lifespan is short enough to not take notice.

So, it’s nice to have an occasional reminder – like when a volcano creates a new island.

Just a few days before our Thanksgiving, an eruption began in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles south of Tokyo. In the weeks that followed, an island has formed.

People are calling the new land mass Niijima. It has an area of about 14 acres and it continues to grow.

Newly formed islands don’t only survive. They can quickly erode or the sea floor sinks under the weight of them and they go below the surface of the water. But, so far, Niijima is remaining an island as a reminder that life is change.

I hope Google doesn’t buy it.

Cabin Dwellers

I encountered Lou Ureneck online with his From the Ground Up,  New York Times blog, which was a memoir about building and brotherhood.

There is also a book about the experience.  After middle age-job loss, the death of his mother, a health scare, and a divorce, Ureneck looked for some project to engage him back into the world. He had been a city dweller for a decade and decided that he needed to build a simple cabin in the woods. He bought five acres in the hills of western Maine and asked his younger brother, Paul, to help him.

He is not the first person to have a book come from that experience. We think of Henry David Thoreau and Walden first. There’s also Louise Dickinson Rich who wrote fiction and non-fiction works about New England, particularly Massachusetts and Maine. Her best-known work is her first book, We Took to the Woods, set in the 1930s when she and her husband Ralph, and her friend and hired help Gerrish, lived in a remote cabin near Lake Umbagog. It is described as “a witty account of a Thoreau-like existence in a wilderness home.

Lou Ureneck’s Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine  fits nicely on that bookshelf.

He may have new to building a cabin, but he was not new to writing. He was a journalism professor at Boston University and a former newspaper editor at the Portland Press Herald in Maine and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His first book, Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska, received the 2007 National Outdoor Book Award. And, the brothers had also built a house together 20 years before.

Building the cabin was a way to reconnect to his life, nature and his brother. It sounds like it should have been easy to build the cabin after building a house, and they had the help of Paul’s sons. But the construction turned out to be challenging and nothing seems to go according to plan.

The complications are also about building family relationships. Yes, there is a healing power in nature. Yes, you do need to set roots and have a place to call home.

See photos of the cabin being built

It wasn’t really planned that I would write this Memorial Day weekend about all these people trying to get away and find themselves. But I had gotten all these books in a bunch. And this is a summer when I am coming to the end of my current academic job.

I don’t know what I;; be doing this fall. And part of me would like to just pack up my office and head out into the woods to build that cabin I keep thinking and writing about.

I have been armchair building and traveling for years. It was accidental that the books I wrote about this weekend all seem to focus on Maine. I have friends (also educators) who own property in Maine and they escape from New Jersey every summer to their rustic pond-side places.

The final book in that pile I brought home is also set in Maine. Eva Murray took a job on Matinicus Island in 1987 and expected to stay a year as the island’s K-8 teacher. But when the school year ended, she turned down her graduate school acceptance, remained on Matinicus, and in 1989 married the island’s electrician. She and her husband Paul raised their two children on Matinicus and continue to live and work there (as an EMT) full time.Her book is Well Out to Sea: Year-Round on Matinicus Island. Though it might be cataloged along with the other simple life, off the grid, farewell to the 21st century books, her life is hardly simple. She writes essays about the land and the people, who are (as Emerson would say) self-reliant.

Now, to put all those books aside and start building something myself this summer.