Bate Loe (A: RAED A FLA, 2eco ) The Mappist ‘When I was sn undergraduate at Brown I came across book ile The Cy of atcenions, about Bogos. knew nothing of Dogotd uel felehe author had caprued its essence. My view ‘was that Onesimo Petia had not written a travel hook bu 2 ‘Work about the soul of Bogoti. Even if were ro read i ater ‘nlf, 1 thought, I would not beable to get ll Peia meant on 8 single reading, I looked him up atthe library but he had ‘ppatenlywnten no other books, ar east aot any m English In my senior year I discovered a somewhat better known ‘he foling, cold walk you trough the wares of Bogert ‘eshout& map and pat your hands directly on the vitality of ‘s0y modern century —the baptismal regres ofa particular 146 The Meppue cathedral, « cornerstone that ed been taken from one buil {nto be sed in anothe, a London plane use planted by Bo book iself demonstrated sich complex linkages, 1 was ey ‘e believe Pefia had no other subject, that he could have wen, ‘en noting else, believed ths was so unl I read The Cy of Flozang Sand a year later, a book about Cape Town, ant Sten a book about Djakama, called The Ciy of Fangipan ‘Though the former was by one Frans Hartman and the lates by Jembo Tran, ech had the dsnncave organic layering of the Pei book, and I et certam they'd been wren by the same man. A national library search through the Unweraty of Michie 2m where had gone to work ona maser’ degree mn geog phy; produced tundreds of books with ules sumiler eo these. Thad to know whether Peta had writen any others aad so read or skimmed perhaps thi of those Igoe through ircibary fon. Some, though wretched, were strange ‘enough 10 be engaging; others were brillant but not sn the ‘ay of Pela T ended up ordening copies of five I believed Peds had weten, books about Perth, Lagos, Tokyo, Venice, ‘nd Boston, the fasta volume by Will Smith Everet called The Ciy of Cod. ‘Who Peds actually was I could not then determine. Letters {0 publishers eventually fed me toa iterary agency in New York witere I was told that the author did not wish «o be Known. I pressed for iformation about what else he might have writen, inquired whether he was sill alive (the book about Venice tad been published more than Géxy years before), but got nowhere. “47‘Asa doctoral sudent at Duke T made the seven Pela books the bass of a disertcion. Ian to show ina senes of egy ‘maps, based on all the dew n Pet's descriptions, what a brilliant exegesis of the social dynamics of these cites he had achieved. My maps showed, for exarople, how water moved rough Djakarra, not just maniepal water but also tucked ‘water and, set by sueet, the fow of ramwater. And how road building m Cape Town reflected the policy of aparhei T received que afew compliments onthe work, but Iknew ‘he maps didnot make apparent the hard, translucent jewel of integration that was each Pea book. Uhad only created some illstrations, however well one. Bur had Tnown whether ke ‘was alive or where elived, would til hve sent m2 copy ‘out of a sense of collegiality and respec. Aer ined he dseraton moved my wife and he youngchlren Brolga abo Bron sad seaps Packs a4 reworaton grgraphe, Fen yes | buted ony fourth o hep to Togo ws conan to aplnnig fm there ad oneeveang took sean ot Chott vt boslores wane led bose, Instdown ese fom eevee ana Ries th Sando Book Sores rep an ye ns Up the ith oor thong we aslaons of bst by Japon wns on the Asan atta onset wpoepty ‘unin es Iwas enti the ore on the gro Tee gen ovr etrl mp cng my Sn agua ie Spmg gat, when apposed spotter Taee Cnatter of dave opened ono th brows, Toned Die Mappese the bottom ofa second drawer, Leame upon ase of maps that seemed vaguely familia, though the ent.es were all n kan “Afier afew minutes of leafing through i dawned on me that they bore a resemblance tothe maps I had done asa student a Duke, I was considering buying one of them as a memento ‘when I caught a name in English in che comer—Corlis Bene fideo. appeared there on every map. | stared at that name a long while, and I began to consider -whae you also may be chunking. I bought all thirteen maps. [Even wthout language to identify information in the keys, even without ties, I could decipher whar the mapmaker Was ‘up 0, One designated areas prone to looding as water from the Sumida River backed up through the city’s storm drains, “Another showed the location of all shops dealing in Edo Penod manusenpis and artwork. Another, using small pink arrows, showed the point of view of each of Hiroshige’s famous One Hundred Views. Yer another showed, in six ame- sequenced panels, the nse and decline of horse barns an the oy. My office in Boston was fourteen hours bebind me, so Thad to leave a message for my atsistanr, aslang him to look up, CCorlis Benefdeo's name. I gave hum some contacts at map beares I used regularly, and asked hum to all me back as soon as he had anything, no matter the hour. He called at three asm. to say that Corls Benefideo had worked as « map- ‘maker forthe US. Coast and Geodene Survey in Washington from 1932 wntil 1958, and thae he was gomg fo fax me some snore informavon, 1 dressed and went dow ta the hotel lobby to wast forthe faxes and read them while I stood there. Benefideo was born, 149{in Fargo, North Dakota, in ipt, He wento work for the fed cal government straight out of Grinnell College during the Depression and by 1940 was traveling to various places— Venice, Bogots, Lagos—in an exchange program. In 1998 he ‘Went into private prachce as a cartographer in Chicago. is ‘main source of income at that time appeared robe from the production of individualized site maps for lygeexate homes being buile along the North Shore of Lake Michigan. The ‘maps were bound in oversize books, owenty by thirty inches, and showed the vegeation, geology, hydrology, biology and ‘even archaeology of each site. They were suboontraced for under several architects. enefideo's Chicago practice closed in 1975. The fax said nothing more was known of his work history, and that he was not listed in any Chicago area phone books, nor wth uy pro- fessional organizations. I fared bac to my office asking them 0 cheek phone books in Fargo, in Washington, D.C, and round Grinnell, lowa—Des Moines and those owns, And asking them to try 10 find someone at what was now the ‘Nauonal Geodette Survey who might have known Benefideo ‘or-who could provide some deal When I came back tothe hotel she fllowing afernoon, there was another fax, No luck with the phone books, I read, ‘but could eal a Maxwell Aber ae the National Survey who'd ‘worked with Benefideo, I waited the necesary few hours for the time change and called Abert sid he had overlapped with Benefideo for one yea, 1968, and though Beneideo had lft voluntarily, t wasn’ is sea “What you had to understand sbout Corl” he sid, “was 150 ‘The Mappist thar he was @ patnot. Now, thar word today, I don’t know, smeans maybe nothing, but Corls fet this very strong com= ‘mitment co his county, and to a certain kind of mapmaking, and he and the Suzvey just ended up ona collision course. The ‘way Corlis worked, you see, the way he approached things, slowed down the production of maps. That wasn't any good from « bureaucratic point of view, He couldn't give up being, comprehensive, you understand, and they just didn't know ‘what to do wath hm.” “What happened to im?" “Well, the man spoke five or six languages and he had both the draftng ability andthe conceptual sil of a fisteratecar= tograplir, so the government should have done something 10 ep the guy-—and he was aso very loyal—but they didn't ‘Oh, bis last year they created 2 project fOr fen, but it was temporary. He saw they didn't want hum. He moved co ‘Chicago—but you said you knew that.” “Mmm, Do you know where he went after Chicago?” “Ido, He went to Fargo, And that's the last know. I wrote sum there until about 198;—he'd have been m his seventies — and then the fast leer came back ‘no forwarding address! So ‘tats the last I ear. I believe he must have died. He'd be, -ohar, eighry-eight now.” “What was the special project?” Well Coxlis, you know; he was like something out of = WPA project, like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and James ‘Agee and them, people that had ths sense of America as a ‘country under siege, undergoing a tial during the Depres- son, a socety that needed it digmiry back, Coris believed that i onder to effect any political or social change, you had ur