Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (20 page)

“Once we discovered she could do the things with the maps, she
wanted
to do it,” Nikki adds. “It was a game. We would get tired of it
way
before she would get tired of it.” In the YouTube video, in fact, you can hear Lilly’s parents try to end the game three separate times. “More!” Lilly always insists.

She’s always been a prodigious memorizer, say her mom and dad. She’s not reading yet, but she knows every word of a hundred or so of her favorite books. But discovering her map ability was an accident. When her beloved uncle Brady headed to Taiwan for two years to serve as a Mormon missionary, Lilly wanted to know where he was. Her parents pointed out Taiwan on a map—and were surprised to find, the next time Lilly saw the map, that she still remembered where Uncle Brady was.

Confirming my intuition that mapheads tend to be gifted spatially, Lilly needs no shortcuts to correctly identify places on the map. “Even when she was just barely two, she could do it on a topographical map, no borders or colors,” says James. “She could do it on a tiny globe the size of a golf ball. It’s not even the shapes, because she could do land-locked countries like Mongolia.”

Lilly’s remarkable knack is a powerful argument that geography
geeks are born, not made—that some of us come into the world with, in effect, a graticule of latitude and longitude predrawn on the otherwise blank slates of our minds. Her parents have tried the “map game” out on her younger sister, Maggie, as well, but to no avail; their first child was just wired differently. James and Nikki can see why the map game might appeal to Lilly in particular: she’s always been a detail-oriented child, prone to noticing—and freaking out—if the power light on the DVD player is left on or the toy cupcakes in her plastic tray are put back in the wrong order. “A little OCD there,” admits her dad. “And initially, it was the attention,” adds Mom. “She loves the clapping. That really helps her turn on her stuff.” Accustomed to just a few pairs of hands clapping for her at home, Lilly seems awestruck in her
Oprah
appearance to have an entire studio full of fans cheering her map skills. Eyes wide, she can barely believe her good fortune.

Lilly will probably grow up to discover, as I did, that such moments of acclaim will be few and far between. As useful and rewarding as map geekery can be, it’s rarely honored, or even noticed, by the outside world. But there’s one glittering exception that provides a national stage for America’s young geography buffs, with millions participating every year: the National Geographic Bee.

In 1988, the National Geographic Society was celebrating its centennial—and, in the wake of the David Helgren–spawned media cycle about map illiteracy, was in the process of refocusing its mission on geography education. Mary Lee Elden, an editor at National Geographic’s children’s magazine
World,
suggested a geography contest for its readers. The idea snowballed into a nationwide geography competition modeled on the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and the society’s board soon approved it as an annual event.

Two decades later, Elden is still coordinating the bee, now a massive event that involves five million participants nationwide. Winnowing a group that size—roughly the entire population of Norway—down to a single winner is a grueling six-month process, of a rigor normally reserved for the selection of Mercury astronauts or Green Berets. Thirteen thousand schools nationwide hold mini-bees each autumn,
and the winner of each is given a written test. The hundred top scorers in each state advance to a state-level bee. Finally, the winners from each of the fifty states (as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, U.S. Pacific territories, and Department of Defense schools worldwide) are flown to Washington each May to participate in the national bee. They take turns at the microphone through nine preliminary rounds of baffling geography questions, until just the ten highest-scoring finalists remain. These contestants appear in a televised final round ending with the crowning of a lone champion, who receives a $25,000 college scholarship and “lifetime membership in the National Geographic Society.” I’m not exactly sure what the latter entails these days, but I bet you get lots of color photos of rain forests and polar bears.

As I step into the Washington Plaza Hotel on a cloudy Wednesday morning, registration has already concluded and the tiled lobby is abuzz with anticipation. Between the koi tank and the closed-off conference rooms that will hold the preliminary matches vibrates a nervous, geographically gifted mass of humanity: fifty-five energetic kids, mostly boys, mostly in striped polo shirts of various colors, mostly heartbreakingly
little
. Each is the nucleus of an excited family unit that doesn’t seem to be interacting much with any of the others, beyond sidelong glances. “It sounds like some of the kids have been here many times,” one worried-looking grandparent tells her daughter in a low voice. It feels like the mob scene behind the starting line of a marathon. Everyone is waiting for the double doors to open.

Once they do, parents review room assignments and hustle their kids into their respective game rooms. The competitors will be divided into five groups of eleven each for the prelims; each group is asked the same set of questions, and only the top ten scorers overall will advance to tomorrow morning’s final. Then I hear a familiar stentorian voice at the end of the hallway, a voice that still makes my pulse rush a little every time I hear it. This isn’t puppy love; it’s just a mild case of Post-Traumatic Game Show Disorder. My old
Jeopardy!
nemesis Alex Trebek is walking toward me, chatting with bee organizers.

“Hello, Ken!” he says amiably. It’s always weird to see Alex out of his usual dapper Perry Ellis getup; today he’s wearing a leather jacket
and Dad jeans and has a garment bag hoisted over one shoulder. The veteran quiz-show host has emceed the National Geographic Bee finals ever since the event’s inception. And he’s not just a bored hired gun jetting in for a quick paycheck: Alex is a geography bee
believer
.

“It’s not just maps!” he tells me sternly when I tell him I’m writing a book about maps. “That’s what we’re trying to do here: show people that old-time geography was just maps, but the new geography is all this instead”: history, earth science, ecology, economics. He tries on a crazy Jerry Lewis voice to do an impression of U.S. geographic ignorance: “‘Uh, France, sure, that’s over here, by, uh, Brazil . . . ’ It would be nice if Americans knew where a country was
before
we went to war with them.”

In a downstairs conference room, one group of eleven competitors is meeting their moderator, National Geographic digital media VP Rob Covey. “Work stops at National Geographic every year for the bee,” Mary Lee Elden told me. “People gather around monitors to watch.” It’s a rewarding moment for the society—one of their only chances to see such an enthusiastic young audience for the maps and magazines and TV shows they spend the rest of the year casting out into the void.

“Your first instruction is to relax, if that’s possible,” Covey says, to uptight parental laughter. The shorter contestants are shown how to lower the microphone stand—there are fourth graders up to eighth graders here, and it’s a two-foot swing in height across the great gulf of puberty in some cases. Covey warns them in advance that “England” will not be accepted as a name for the United Kingdom, nor “Holland” for the Netherlands. Oceania is officially a region, not a continent. (This was apparently a point of controversy and protest at a previous bee.) As the eleven boys take their turns at the mike for a practice round, I slip into a folding chair on the room’s center aisle. Brian McClendon, who is representing National Geographic’s new partner Google at the bee, sits down next to me. He’s the VP of engineering for Google’s Maps and Earth products, which makes him, among this crowd, something of a sex symbol. There were gasps and whispers of “Yeah!” among the kids in the crowd when he was introduced.

“Okay if I sit here?”

“Sure. This is clearly the fifty-yard line of geography bee seating.”

“The Prime Meridian,” he corrects me.

“Which country borders more landlocked countries—Algeria or Democratic Republic of the Congo?” Rob Covey is asking the first contestant, Robert Chu of Connecticut. He has fifteen seconds to answer.

“Democratic Republic of the Congo,” he replies instantly, with utter confidence. He’s correct. My eyebrows shoot up a couple inches. In a heartbeat, he’s managed to visualize the borders of two different African nations,
as well as the borders of all their neighbors,
and calculate the answer. The Democratic Republic of Congo beats Algeria by three countries.

The geography bee may have originated as a result of all the face-palm-stupid answers that American students were giving on geography surveys, but the questions in the national bee are far from stupid—they are very, very hard. And fourth graders are acing them. Zimbabwean national parks, Dominican volcanoes, Italian car production statistics, Swazi life expectancy—nothing seems beyond their grasp. “At first you think, ‘Oh, that’s cute. I bet I can do as well as that,’” says Ted Farnsworth, the father of Arizona contestant Nicholas Farnsworth. “Then you watch the state finals, and you’re like—” Here he makes the noise of a slide whistle deflating.

The questions can—in fact,
have to—
be this hard because the kids who make it to nationals are so scrupulously prepared. A few weeks ago I drove out to the exurbs ten miles east of Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, to meet Caitlin Snaring, the impossibly self-possessed high school sophomore who, in 2007, became only the second girl ever to win the bee. But that was Caitlin’s second run at the title; the year before, she’d been ousted in the prelims.

“Do you remember the question that you went out on in your first bee?” I asked, knowing she did.

“ ‘What do you call the line of thunderstorms that precedes a cold front?’” she recited verbatim. (Caitlin says she has a “near-photographic” memory.) I didn’t know the answer either: a squall line.

“It’s not technically a physical geography term,” she grumbled,
apparently still stung by the loss. “It’s just something sailors say. But I was really disappointed. I thought that would be my only chance.” After the loss, she cried, briefly, and gave her mom, Traci, a hard time for never having found her a copy of the out-of-print
National Geographic Almanac,
which, it turned out, had included the crucial fact.

“We talked about how hard the questions were going to be, and how hard it was going to be on TV under the pressure,” remembered Traci. “I said, ‘Do you want to do this again, or don’t you?’ The next day she had a list of more books she wanted me to buy for her, ready to study. She wanted to do it all over again.”

For two years, Caitlin spent six or seven hours a day doing nothing but studying geography. No days off, no weekends off. She always had a book or a map in her lap—in the backseat of the car, on the bleachers at her younger brother’s baseball games. She filled ten three-ring binders with lists—mountains, islands, cities on rivers—and used colored markers to mark locations on hundreds of maps. She always prepared two copies: one with labels and one without, so she could test herself flash card–style. Traci remembered Caitlin advancing across the map like Napoleon’s army, country by country: “One week she’d focus on, say, India, and we would just check out every book about India in the library, looking for anything new.” The phrase “anything new” strikes me as funny: Caitlin’s geography knowledge had become so comprehensive that she was literally
running out of new facts to study
!
^*

She studied smarter as well as harder. Her previous year’s bee experience had allowed her to analyze National Geographic’s question style, and she began to see patterns. So she bought videotapes of every previous bee final and made a database of every question asked. (Having worked out a very similar regimen before going on
Jeopardy!,
I am probably one of the very few people in the world who could nod appreciatively at this story without inwardly thinking, “What a nut!”)
She made checklists of places and topics that hadn’t come up in a while, figuring they had a better chance of appearing next year. She traded tips online with fellow bee veterans: track down an Australian atlas called
Geographica,
they said, or a children’s atlas published by Dorling Kindersley. When she realized that lots of bee questions came from
National Geographic
magazine, she began annotating every issue in highlighter. On the plane to D.C. for her big rematch, she came across a mention of the fishing fleet on the Italian island of Lampedusa and neatly marked it in yellow pen. Sure enough, a Lampedusa question popped up in the finals. Right on schedule.

Caitlin breezed through her second bee without missing a single question. In her final showdown against Suneil Iyer of Kansas, the fifth question asked for the capital of imperial Vietnam. She wrote “Hue” and could tell from the time that Suneil was taking that he was writing something much, much longer (“Ho Chi Minh City”). “I’m looking up at Alex, because he’s looking at both our answers. He looks at Suneil’s, and he’s like, hmm.” Caitlin mimicked a Trebekian scowl. “Then he looks at mine, and he looks at me . . . and he winks. I was like,
whoa!
”

I was a little jealous. Alex Trebek
never
winked at me.

After themed rounds on current events, wildlife, and medicine, I head upstairs to the Diplomat Room to watch a different cohort of young geographers. Representing Washington State at this year’s bee is none other than Benjamin Salman, the boy with a whole country in his head. He’s up first in each round and stands at the microphone smiling placidly, with his arms folded. He hasn’t missed a question yet—he knows where Dagestan is, where vicuñas live, the largest city in North Africa. (Spoilers: Russia, Peru, Cairo.) Since each player is asked a different question in each round, there’s an element of chance underlying the skill. “You’ll hear everybody else’s questions and think, ‘That’s such an easy question!’” Caitlin told me. “But then it comes to you, and it’ll be the only one you didn’t know.” One player in this round is asked to identify the country where there’s fighting going on in Ramadi and Fallujah (Iraq; you may have heard about it), but the next one
needs to locate Hyesan, capital of the Yanggang Province. (Hyesan is a minor industrial city in North Korea, making this a very hard question indeed.) It’s the luck of the draw.