Making a Map in 1974

Continuing with the premise that I am 9 y.o., and following the premise that I'm earning money to buy tools and products, as well as Christmas presents, some weeks go by.  Because I want specifically a Michelin map, none of the map companies in the city (and there were several, which I came to know through my father), it's not available as a general commercial product until the late 1970s.  I checked, calling around town, because research.  So, unfortunately, I have to obtain the address for Michelin maps, through the library because the Yellow Pages are local (but I might get lucky and find a Michelin office in Calgary), write to them with a money order, and wait to receive my map in the mail.  That's most likely a 3 to 4 week timeline.  Just imagine that sort of world.

So I see my school burn down and I'm shipped off to Sir Winston Churchill, as I said.  My older brother, who is in grade 9, and goes to Simon Fraser Junior High, has to walk me and my sister, who's in grade 5, down to the high school where the city has found us rooms to learn in.  Here's some context:

With my house marked with a red loop, the reader can see Dr. E.W. Coffin Elementary at the top centre of the map, at the head of Barrett Dr.  At the bottom of Barrett Dr. is Simon Fraser Junior High, where I went through grades 7 to 9.  Across a large green field at the bottom left is Sir Winston Churchill.  As can be plainly seen, I never had a long walk school, though as I said I did get bussed for a time because my elementary school burned down.  As the reader can also see, my brother wasn't overly taxed by having to walk my sister and I to school.  Though he thought he was.

So I have my drawing tools and I have my map, and I've bought a roll of plotting paper, 40 weight if I can find it, because this paper is designed for draughting and is resistant to smudging.  The edges are very sharp and will align perfectly with one another if care is taken.  This is how we can map strips of Wales and then put them together as the pieces are completed.

Unfolding the map of Wales, we need it to be as flat as possible.  This can be managed by smoothing out the map on a large floor surface — our kitchen floor was large enough — and then very patiently asking to borrow my mother's iron, which at that time must have been a valuable kitchen tool from the importance my mother attached to it.  Then, laying a bed sheet on the map, this being large enough to cover everything in a single piece, and using the iron at a very low temperature, we ensure that all the  crimps and folds of the map are evened out.  From then on we can roll the map up when not in use, like a map should be kept, and beg a cardboard tube from my father's supply, as his work involved his dealing with oil well sites and such all day, and there were always empty tubes good for maps collecting among his things.

Now I've thought about this a lot ... I need to draw graph lines over the whole of the map of Wales; that means a large table, it means a table with a very straight edge, it means needing a T-square and finally, it needs a person who's capable of respecting the desire of a 9 y.o. to do a good job.

In the fall of 1976, I'm going to start grade 7 at Simon Fraser.  And this will introduce me to one of my favourite teachers through the years, Mr. Leavitt, whose going to teach me shop for three years.  Unfortunately, we haven't met yet.  But he does know my brother, and they do have a good relationship.  In grade 7, when my brother started those same classes, the first task was to draught the parts of a stool, then cut those parts out of wood, then finish the wood, then assemble the stool.  When I reached grade 7, I made the exact same stool, though I finished it differently.  As chance would have it, I lost my stool when my parents sold their cabin in 2009 (they just didn't realize it was anything but a stool, and assumed no one would want it).  But as chance would have it, I have my brother's stool still with me, right now.  I don't get along with my brother, so fuck him, I'm keeping his stool.

See, one of my issues at being 9 is that my brother is still living at home.  He's five years older than me and he's a bully.  We share a bedroom together, which he resents; I am able to speak, which he resents; I like to spend time in our bedroom working at my desk, which he resents.  This resentment regularly builds up into periods of hitting, pushing ... and occasionally, destroying things that matter to me.  He will leave home one month after he finishes high school, following a big argument with my parents; until then, I still have to be on my guard.

Anyway, Mr. Leavitt.  It would take nerve to head down to Simon Fraser, walk boldly into a school with a lot of older students, watching out for my brother (who was not the type to defend me against others), in order to reach Leavitt's shop so that I could introduce myself.  As I said, he did like my brother, and my brother liked him.  This is because Leavitt respected competency above all things, and I have to give that to my brother.  Leavitt was also friendly, empathic, able to play outside the guidelines of his role, had considerable latitude regarding what went on in his shop (because much of the work we did there was dangerous) and, finally, loved to teach.  This last could have been written out in large soldered iron metal letters, 20 inches high, and strung along the side wall of his shop.  Leavitt liked very much anyone who would let him teach something.

He certainly had the table and the T-square I wanted, along with other tools for draughting ... and just possibly he might have let me come in on some late Friday afternoon (he tended to tool around in his shop long after classes were done), and let me have a couple of hours use of a nice, big, flat table.

My other option would have to be to approach my father to ask if he'd take me to his office and use a table there.  He worked in a downtown office for Gulf Canada, a subsidiary of Gulf Oil.  He worked at Elveden House in downtown Calgary until I was out of grade 9, when he moved to a big office in Gulf Canada Square.  His Elveden office was tight, cluttered, insufficient for his needs and he would often come home and take over the kitchen table after dinner to get his work done.  Still, there were tables there that I could use ... if he let me.

This must all seem strange to the reader, as I talk about the difficulties and problems of getting hold of a simple big table in the time period.  It's all to explain how different the world was at the time, and the ways in which the world viewed anything that might have been tried by what was seen as a child.  Nowadays, no one gives a moment's thought to a bunch of 9 year olds getting together to play a game once a week, because group activities and individual achievement is far more celebrated today than it was at the time.  I grew up in the age of "Because" as an answer and "Children are to be seen and not heard" as an acceptable philosophy of parenthood.  Money was not spent on children.  Children's things were not respected or carefully preserved.  And things that a child might want to do was seen with suspicion, unless it was specifically related to some official activity like making a project for a science fair.  It if had been my goal to grow beans under ultraviolet light as my science fair project, my father would have bought me the pots, the beans, the lights, everything I wanted, and would have set aside a large area in the basement rumpus room for me to use for months while I grew beans.  But making a map is not "official."  It isn't homework, and it isn't for a church club or a cub scout badge.  Therefore, by all the measures of the time in which I grew up, it wasn't respectable.

This perhaps helps explain some of my indulgence in D&D — not as an escape, but perhaps as an association that could appreciate my kind of crazy.

Anyway, enough dithering.  Let's assume we have the table and move forward.

Start by squaring the road map as precisely as possible to the table's corner, so that the paper lines up with the top of the table on one edge and the side of the table with the other.  This allows us to use our T-square in two directions.  The top of the actual map, between it's white borders, is perfectly straight in relationship to the map's physical edge, so check the T-square that's guided by the table edge against the top edge of the printed map.  This ensures that the lines we draw will be precisely east-west.  Then provide sufficient masking tape to the edges to be sure the map's not going to move as we work on it.  Don't overdo it with the masking tape, because we may have to do this process over more than one visit.

Using a 3H or 4H pencil, start ticking half-inch increments down one side of the map, starting from the map's top.  Do not measure each tick against the previous tick; measure every tick we make against the top of the map.  This can mean needing a yardstick, if one is available.  If we have to use a shorter ruler, don't measure further than the first 12 inches; we can measure the next 12 inches when the first 12 inches are sectioned.  But a yard stick is far, far superior here.

Now, do the same measurement down the other side of the map.  We want to be able to draw our east-west lines using two guidelines, both of which are desired to be as accurate as possible.  Lining up the T-square, using a 2H pencil, draw out the parallel lines one by one, patiently.  Look at the gap between each line before making the next line.  Does it look right?  Is there anything about this new line that looks less than perfectly parallel?  If it does, double-check the measurements.  Be precise, always.  There are lots of points in this process where going back is not only very difficult, but potentially too late.

Continue down the whole map, or until we've reached the limit of our ruler.  Now begin the process of making half-inch ticks along the top of the map, not forgetting to exchange our pencil for the 3 or 4H.  Make a second line of ticks along the bottom line we've already drawn, 12 inches down the map if that's all our ruler allowed.  Exchanging the pencil again, fill in the vertical lines, squaring off the map.  Continue this process until the whole map is squared ... even those areas that are just sea.  In some cases, we'll need those empty sea squares for counting off how far we are from the edge of the map, as we're drawing later.

Why a 3 or 4H pencil?  Because it's easy to erase if the tick is made in the wrong place.  The lightness of the pencil ensures it won't leave a confusing residue behind.  Why a 2H?  The map is going to get rolled up and unrolled dozens and dozens of times.  Our humanly oil-producing hand is going to be moving overtop of the pencil marks over and over, as we spread the map or turn it or in a hundred other way.  Over time, these 2H pencil marks are going to degrade; we want to be sure they leave enough of a shadow so we can use them months from now.

Good.  The whole map is squared off, assuming we've had the time.  There's nothing clever about the purpose of these squares, though there was in the 14th century.  We're simply using these squares as an method for hand-drawing and plotting our larger map of Wales in the future.  We can plainly see that such and such a city symbol is in the bottom corner of such-and-such a square.  We can then transpose that symbol by eye to it's parallel square on our self-created map without difficulty, with sufficiently enough accuracy to escape the eye of any but the wisest cartographer.  And there aren't many of those around.

The next simple task is to decide how large our finished Wales map is going to be.  If the Michelin map is 3 feet high, and we want a Wales map that's 9 feet high (measuring the distance from floor to ceiling in my room), then we need simply make each replicate square on the finished map 1½ inches high.  This multiplies the scale by three in both directions.  If, on the other hand, the height of my room's wall is just 8 and a half feet, this makes each section 1.41667 inches square — which anyone can tell us is a very difficult thing to measure using crude tools.  Canada hasn't adopted the metric system yet, and won't until I'm in grade eight — so a centimeter measurement isn't easy to achieve.  The best alternative would be to make each square 1⅜ths wide, those gradations actually appearing on our imperial ruler.

We can now roll up our map, thank Mr. Leavitt, assure him I'm looking forward to seeing him when  I start junior high, and go home.  The next bit I can do on my parent's kitchen table.

From our roll, we want to cut a piece of paper that's about six to ten inches longer than our maps going to be.  We can trim the edge later.  There were rolls available back in the 80s that were just 12 inches wide instead of 24, as the link above indicated, but who knows what I might find in a print shop in the 1970s.  That was a very different world, I can tell you.  A public print shop was next to unheard of, even in a fair-sized city like Calgary (population, 443,000 in 1974).

Before we cut the paper, however, make sure the surface we're working on is very clean.  Wash the table, then be sure it's very, very dry, every time before working.  Take note of any divots in the wood and work away from them if possible.  When using a pencil, don't press down, ever.  It's just good sense to apply a careful, methodical patience to every action.  Never rush or hurry in any action when drawing.  Measure twice, as described above, and even three or four times, as mapmaking is more precise than carpentry.

That first line drawn at one end of our 9½ ft. cut of paper is critical.  It must be drawn a perfect 90 degree angle from the edge of the paper's roll — knowing as we do that the edge is perfectly straight, since this is draughting paper.  To get this near-perfect, use the end of the paper as a straight 90 degree angle from the long edge, since we know this is perfect also.  Now we want to draw our lines with a 6H pencil, one that's very hard.  That's because, eventually, we want these lines to disappear from the final product.  Since they are so narrow and so light, we can see them clearly when we are plotting the initial part of our map, but later as we fill the map, and ultimately colour it, these lines simply vanish.  Therefore, it's important not to press the pencil down to make the lines clearer.  Not doing so is part of our purpose here.

Steadily build up a lattice work of squares on the draughting paper, just as we did on the road map.  It's not necessary to square out all of our 9½ ft. roll.  We can only work on a small part of it at a time; and when working on that small part, let the remainder of the scroll remain rolled up, with a paper weight, something that we also must keep clean, holding the roll in place.  Feel free to apply masking tape to the corners of the roll to keep it pasted to the table while we're working on it, remembering however that placing and removing tape repeatedly will degrade the edges of the paper.  But then, we've provided an unusual surplus at both ends of the roll so that the edge can be degraded at no cost to us.

Now, we can begin mapmaking.  Deciding which places we're going to include in our new map, and what features, many of which will be plainly indicated on the Michelin map, we can sketch each one in as desired.  We can add more of our own, too, though personally I never liked to do this.  I always felt that the map could retain more value if it appealed both to persons who played D&D and those that did not.  This is easier if there's no D&D flotsam muddying up the design.

This is far enough along as far as mapmaking goes for the present.  There's more to say, but that's in the way of artwork and I'll leave it for then.  I'm going to turn away from this aspect of the series momentarily while I pursue something else, namely a thing I'd be able to suddenly do with an alacrity that would terrify both my teachers and my parents ... a thing I definitely wasn't that good at when I was nine.

I can write now.