The geography of a world turned upside down.

Cliff points out a camping spot on his handy topographic map (and you just know that it's one of those raised topographic maps where you can actually feel the changes in elevation. Man, I loved those things.) for Mark and Rusty to use. We'll just have to take Cliff's word for it that there's water somewhere on that brown map, but I would assume that if there wasn't, Mark would have pointed that out, or at least had the Jack Elrod Ball bring it up later. As Cliff pours Mark a cup of coffee (because that's what a good host would do), he tells him to be on the lookout for alligators. Okay, so I'm confused. I was always under the impression that Mark Trail lived in a northern forest. That Lost Forest was a northern forest and that Mark and Rusty were going fishing in a forest, or at least in a lake surrounded by a forest. (That river was good enough for them on the last trip. Why the need for a different body of water? Are they going to try to catch something really big or maybe even mythical?) Apparently I was wrong because while Lost Forest might seem to be a northern forest, it is also adjacent to a swamp filled with alligators (and probably leeches, chupacabra, and maybe even the Boggy Creek Monster because that didn't exactly live near a creek). I guess this will just make stumbling upon that alligator poaching scheme all the easier, though I don't much like what Cliff had to say about a possible fate for Sassy (but then I remember that this is not a Dick Tracy comic, so the little gal will probably be all right), but if Mark does plan on fighting crime on his vacation, I really hope that Andy is just waiting outside and not back at the cabin in Lost Forest with Cherry and Doc.