In the summer of 1956, a broke Jack Kerouac ascended Washington State’s Desolation Peak to serve as a fire lookout — room and board for $230 a month, the meditative isolation that never quite materialized, and a “panoramic” circular map that oriented him to his elevated universe. Thea Applebaum Licht’s collection for The Public Domain Review presents the very same kind of map: hand-drawn by civil engineer Archie G. Norcross for the Maine Forestry Department between 1918 and 1922, each one taking a specific fire tower as its epicenter and annotating the full 360-degree horizon with named landmarks for triangulating wildfire plumes. The maps were used with an alidade (a simple sighting device Kerouac called his “firefinder”) atop steel towers 12 to 48 feet above craggy Northeastern summits, erected after devastating fires in 1903 and 1908. By mid-century the network of 8,000 towers was superseded by cameras, thermal satellites, and aerial patrols; most fell into disrepair, the Doubletop Mountain lookout “notorious for getting struck by lightning” and dismantled before 1972. What remains is a quiet cartographic record of a vanished human practice — analog GIS drawn in ink, where the observer was the sensor and the map was a custom rendering of that one specific vantage point.
Archie G. Norcross' Maine Forest Fire Maps (1918–22) — The Public Domain Review
Circular panoramic maps custom-made for the fire towers that once dotted the American wilderness, drawn by civil engineer Archie G. Norcross — a vanished analog-GIS technology that Jack Kerouac used during his summer as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak.