I’ve always been a map guy. Even as a little kid, my constant companion was an oversized Rand McNally road atlas that I’d haul around the house, curling up on the couch in the living room and tracing with my finger the blue lines of interstates, and curling red threads of rural two-lanes. I’d sit there and try to imagine life in all those little dots along the way.
I was the same with globes, and world maps—I had the latter masking-taped to the ceiling over my bed. And sometimes, I would just lay there and stare into the blue, all that ocean, way out there. The Pacific, almost incomprehensibly huge, encompassing almost a third of the earth’s surface. Bigger than all the continents, combined….