Here’s one guy Thomas Swick was not talking about in his great story about why geography matters. Robert Klose loves maps, so much so that his idea of a “perfect evening” is this: “I pour a mug of hot chocolate, adjust the pillows on the sofa, turn on the reading lamp, curl up in my quiet corner, and open an atlas,” he writes in The Christian Science Monitor. “Where shall I commence my journey this time? Australia? The American South? Myanmar? It really doesn’t matter, for despite my chosen trajectory, I always get diverted into interesting byways, backwaters, and vest-pocket principalities.”

I’ve got a little Klose in me. I love immersing myself in maps, but usually when I’m traveling. But Klose takes the practice of reading maps to another level.

As I run my eyes over the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the Hungarian plain, the endless Siberian forest, or the tiniest of islands in the South Pacific, I find myself considering that there are lives being led in these places. At the very moment I am looking down at Bhutan and running my little finger over that tiny Himalayan state, I imagine a man—a farmer, perhaps—carrying his young son to bed and pausing to whisper a few last loving words to him in a language indecipherable to me. Then it’s lights out in Bhutan, and I am off to another wonderland where dawn may be breaking.

Related on World Hum:
* Google ‘My Maps’ Debuts With Oral History of Route 66
* ‘Mapping the Imagination’ with Simon Winchester, Peter Turchi and Madhur Jaffrey
* Michael Hess: The “On the Road” Google Maps Mashup
* Name Every UN Member State. You Have 10 Minutes.