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them.”
    â€œYou’re afraid that they’ll fall on you while you’re asleep and smother you?” she suggested.
    â€œNo,” I said. “It’s not that. It’s—look at the way the mapmakers vary the thickness of the lines that represent roads and highways, and the way they use different colors.”
    â€œVery nice,” she said.
    â€œBut—suppose they make these maps in such a way that they tend to lead the traveler astray?”
    â€œAstray?”
    â€œI mean, what if they lead people to their gas stations?”
    â€œWhat?” she asked.
    â€œAll the gas companies make maps like these and give them out at their stations, right?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œSuppose they make the roads going past their stations look more attractive or more interesting, so that people will choose those routes and won’t choose other routes, where the gas stations that sell other kinds of gas are located.”
    â€œYou’re nuts,” she told me.
    â€œMaybe,” I admitted.
    To test my theory—and Spike’s, I suppose—I wrote to other gas companies. I compared their maps’ depictions of the roads along the route that I intended to follow with the version offered by the company that owned the station where my father worked. I imagined traveling the routes that the maps depicted, and tried to decide whether I was being steered toward each company’s gas stations. After many long hours of thought experimentation, I came to the conclusion that the maps could not be trusted—and, simultaneously, I discovered that the trip so often taken in my imagination had grown stale.
    So I refreshed the trip that had grown stale by deciding to travel without a map. Why travel with a map that you’ve decided you can’t trust anyway? I took all the maps down from my walls and ceiling, folded them up, and put them away in my closet.
    Having no map forced me to ask directions of strangers, and along the way I learned that doing so leads to fascinating exchanges, exchanges that are, more often than not, useless, but fascinating nonetheless. If I had it to do over again (in actuality, not in memory, as I am doing it now), I think I might travel with a map. I’ve decided that they’re more trustworthy than I thought—and they are much more trustworthy than the advice of strangers.

Chapter 2
    Our Little Secret
    I AM SOMETIMES asked to explain the secret of the happiness that Albertine and I have found in each other’s company over all the years that we have been together, through thick and thin and through thin and thinner, and when asked I admit quite frankly that the secret is our nearly perfect balance of induced and dynamic lift.
    Lift, on a wing, on an airplane, is a matter of relative pressure: less pressure above, pressing down; more pressure below, pushing up. When the pressure’s off above and on below, we rise. I am a great believer in lift, unlike Wolfgang Langewiesche, who, in his Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying, disparaged lift. It might be fair to say that Langewiesche pooh-poohed the whole idea of lift, coming very close to calling it an illusion, as close as Kurt Gödel came to calling time an illusion in “A Remark About the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy,” his contribution to the 1949 Festschrift volume, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. For Langewiesche, the upward mobility of a forward-moving airplane is the result of the reaction of the undersurface of the wing to the force of the air below the wing when the airplane’s engine pushes the wing against the air below it at a sufficient angle of attack—that is, with a sufficient upward slant. The air pushes the wing up, in Langewiesche’s view, and the wing needn’t be an airfoil; it might as well be a sheet of plywood; it could be any plane surface at all. Hence, Langewiesche points