Keep your hands off my Gazetteer

Mine is wrinkled, stained with grease and the corners are all curled up. There’s even a chunk missing from the back cover where I tore off a piece to start my Coleman stove while motorcycle camping last summer. I’d never leave home without it. It’s my go-to map. It’s my DeLorme Maine Atlas and Gazetteer.

The news last week that GPS giant Garmin is buying local map-makers DeLorme has got me spooked.

“The fate of the company’s printed maps is unclear but unchanged for the time being, according to Stiver and Ted Gartner, Garmin’s spokesman.”

I think we’ve heard that kind of line before.

My Gazetteer

My Gazetteer.

Of course, I own more than one. The wrinkled one lives in the trunk of my sidecar. There’s also a pristine copy on my nightstand. I love to dream up summer trips in the dead of winter, while drifting off to dreamland. The one in the bookcase downstairs has coffee rings on it. That’s the one I sit at the kitchen table with in the morning, planning my BDN assignment routes or Sunday rides.

I don’t remember ever driving a car or motorcycle without bringing a Gazetteer. My parents must have given me one when I got my license. I had one that lived under the backseat of my first car — a 1979 Jeep CJ7.

My first motorcycle (a 1972 Honda CB500) had a cheap pair of faded saddlebags. The Gazetteer was always in the right bag, so I could reach back and grab it while keeping my left hand on the clutch. I remember seeing it on in the ditch, with my other scattered belongings, when I wrapped my second motorcycle around a telephone pole in Sedgwick.

The Gazetteer has done more than show me how to get where I’m going, all these years. It’s actually told me where I should be going. I think the listed waterfalls, museums, canoe trips, mountains and covered bridges help form Mainers’ notions of what makes Maine, Maine.

Is there any other publication so complete, showing roads, trails, campgrounds, public reserve land, rivers, coves, islands and city streets? Am I the only one who didn’t know what an esker was before they picked up a Gazetteer? I doubt it.

If the new owners kill the map that helps define the state, what will happen to us? How will we know the Crocker Cirque even exists, let alone how to find it. (Map 29, D3, by the way.)

So, I’m looking at you, Garmin, out there in Kansas: Keep your hands off my Gazetteer.

You can steal my LL Bean boots, you can eat my mince meat pie
You can swipe my lobster roll, though I’d like to see you try
You can take my can of Moxie and fill it up with sand
There is one thing you’ll only get, from my cold, dead hands…

Keep your hands off my Gazetteer
Keep your hands off my Gazetteer
Ain’t no doubt about it, I’d be lost without it
Keep your Hands off my Gazetteer

I don’t want your fancy GPS to tell me where I am
I don’t need your wicked smart phone app and roving data plan
Just gimme a dog-eared Gazetteer, maps one to seven-o
It’ll take me where I’m headed for and always lead me home

I never lose the signal, I’m never out of range
I just wet my finger and then I turn the page
I never change the batteries and it’s never out of juice
It even comes in handy when you’re fending off a moose

I don’t care how many satellites are whizzing ‘round in space
All them high-tech gizmos can never take its place
It’s a thing that shows us just who and where we are
And it’s waiting for adventure in the back of every car

MyGazetteer

Troy R. Bennett

About Troy R. Bennett

Troy R. Bennett is a Buxton native and longtime Portland resident whose photojournalism has appeared in media outlets all over the world.