Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (21 page)

Of course, all questions are easy if you know them and hard if you don’t. Benjamin knows that Majuro is the capital of the Marshall Islands, which impresses the heck out of me, but records his first miss when he says that karst landscapes are shaped by volcanic activity, not water erosion. But everybody, it seems, has some blind spot here: Eric Yang of Texas misses a question on Japan’s Mount Asama, and Henry Glitz of Pennsylvania misses his question in the dreaded analogies round, which contestants shiver and tell ghost stories about. Even for the map-inclined, this round really is a nightmare; imagine if your SAT test was full of questions like

Kafue : Zambezi :: Shyok : ___________

Henry says “Mekong,” but the correct answer is “Indus.” (The Shyok River is a tributary of the Indus, just as the Kafue River flows into the Zambezi.) There are no perfect scores left in the group now; Benjamin might still have a chance.

There’s definitely one nerd here who’s way out of his league, and that’s me. I figured I was a guy with plenty of geolove and quiz-show experience to boot under his belt—surely I could hang with sixth-graders, right? But no, two or three times each round, I’ll be stumped by a question that a bee player will quickly answer in a confident little voice that hasn’t even changed yet. The Qizilqum Desert is in Uzbekistan! Guanabara used to be a state of Brazil! I feel like Richard Dreyfuss, surrounded by all those superadvanced Munchkin aliens at the end of
Close Encounters
.
^*

After the preliminary rounds are over, there’s a logjam at the top
of the standings: eleven players are competing for the last seven spots in the finals. I hurry downstairs to the tiebreak round so I can cheer on Benjamin Salman—who has history on his side. The Washington champ has won the National Geographic Bee more times than any other state: five overall, one out of every four events in the bee’s history. When I asked Caitlin to explain this remarkable track record, she credited the rainy weather. “Kids here are prone to stay inside more,” she said, “and if you’re inside, you might as well look at a few maps!”—as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. Who would watch TV or play video games when you could look at maps?

An eager crowd has crammed into the hotel ballroom to watch the tiebreaker, wisps of it spilling out into the hallway beyond. I’m craning my neck to try to see the players at the front of the room as the moderator begins the first question.

“Southeast Asia’s only member of OPEC, an organization of oil-producing countries, suspended its membership last year because it had become a net importer of oil rather than a net producer. Name this country.”

Indonesia! I know this one. I try to beam Indonesian vibes in Benjamin’s direction. After fifteen seconds, the contestants reveal the answers they’ve written. Benjamin wrote “Malaysia,” eliminating himself from the finals, but he doesn’t betray any disappointment, walking stoically off the stage. But the eleven-year-old from Nevada who also missed the question looks stricken, almost sick. He bursts into tears on the way back to his seat and buries his head in his dad’s shoulder.

This boy isn’t much older than my own son, so his heartbreak is almost intolerably hard for me to watch. All fifty-five of these kids have put untold hours of preparation into the event. They may be the geographically brightest bulbs in the country, but that doesn’t matter: fifty-four of them are going to end up bounced because they missed a question, and they’re going to remember that question for the rest of their lives. Is this really a lofty educational exercise? Isn’t it more like, well, child abuse?

“Do you ever think, no geography is worth this?” I ask Mary Lee Elden after the match.

“I think they learn something from it,” she says. “Yes, they feel disappointed,
but they learn to handle their disappointment.” The bee, as you might expect, attracts more than its share of kids with Asperger syndrome and other social interaction issues, and these kids are particularly prone to losing control after a tough loss. “I’ll be honest with you,” says Mary Lee. “As a teacher and a parent, I don’t think I’d put my child through it.”

But the organizers do what they can to soothe crushed dreams and bruised egos. Contestants eliminated in the finals get to decompress in a backstage greenroom with milk and cookies and staff members telling them how great they were. Children may feel life’s setbacks more keenly than adults, but they also bounce back quicker. “It happens every year,” laughs Mary Lee. “I have to send somebody back there because they start having a party and they get a little loud, and you start hearing them from outside.”

Parents aren’t allowed in the cookie room, and that’s not an accident. At the start of every bee, Mary Lee sends the students ahead into a reception and asks their parents to stay behind for a moment. “I give them a little talk, saying that they’re there to support their children. This is their children’s contest, not theirs.” The yearly lecture is a result of past run-ins with the atlas-cramming equivalent of high-pressure Little League dads. “I once had a father go up to a young boy after the preliminary rounds and start yelling at him: how could he get this wrong, and why didn’t he make the finals? It just tore my heart. I went up and took the boy away from his father and said, ‘Let’s go over here.’ They lose perspective, that their child is just doing the best they can. Just give them a hug and tell them they’re wonderful.”

That afternoon I hop aboard one of a flotilla of buses parked in front of the hotel. The bee weekend isn’t all questions and answers: the day before the prelims, the contestants and their parents get a tour of Washington, and the night before the finals, there’s always a picnic. Most of the kids can relax, with the bee finally behind them; for the ten finalists, it’s a chance to blow off a little steam before tomorrow’s baptism by fire: more of the same brain-straining questions, only now with the added stress of TV cameras and Alex Trebek.

Vansh Jain of Wisconsin and Shiva Kangeyan of Florida, sitting
behind me, are among tomorrow’s batch of finalists, and they’re talking shop. “Is the lowest point in Africa in Djibouti?” Vansh asks. “Yes!” comes a unanimous chorus of replies. The conversation moves on to the tides in the Bay of Fundy.

They all seem lively and relaxed, whether they’re finalists like Vansh and Shiva or nearly-made-its like their friend across the aisle, South Dakota’s Alex Kimn. They’re not sitting with their parents anymore, and the contrast to the high-strung little huddles in the hotel lobby this morning is remarkable. This is band-of-brothers camaraderie, this is furlough from the parental grind.

“So were you guys nervous today?” I turn around to ask.

There is general scorn. “I think being nervous is funny,” says Alex.

“What about your parents? Are they more nervous than you?”

“
Oh,
yes.” “Yes yes yes!” “Definitely.”

I’m sitting next to Doug Oetter, the geography professor who helps run the Georgia state bee. Seeing students
excel
at geography is a pleasant switch for him. “My college students are geeked out to the max,” he says—proficient, thanks to AP exams, in genetics, cell structure, amino acids, electron shells. “But you ask them about basic geography or earth science—cumulus clouds or biomes—and they’re clueless. I literally have to start with longitude and latitude. They don’t know what causes the changing of the seasons, or the tides.” Just like ancient civilizations creating legends about pomegranates and things to explain natural phenomena, I think. Except that these kids probably don’t care that they don’t know.

Academic geographers actually criticized the idea of the bee when National Geographic first announced it, sure that it would hurt the prestige of geography to reduce it to the status of mere facts, spelling-bee fodder. “
Rote memorization must be emphasized
as the level of competitive difficulty increases,” predicted Marc Eichen of Queens College in one geography journal. “The geographic facts would need to become increasingly trivial to produce a winner.”

But Oetter disagrees. You can’t write without learning the alphabet first, he says, and you can’t do sophisticated work in geography if you don’t know where places are. “These kids are going to show up in
college already knowing that alphabet. They’re going to write the geographic novels of tomorrow.”

Behind us, tomorrow’s scholars are currently trying to figure out which way the bus is headed, with the help of Shiva’s compass watch. There is also some disagreement on the identity of the world’s leading gold producer. “South Africa! No, China. Yeah, yeah, China.”(Correct. China passed South Africa in 2008.)

Encouraged by how quickly the kids on the bus seem to have decompressed, I track down Benjamin Salman’s mom, Sarah, at the picnic. She’s balancing a plate of barbecue on one knee.

“How’d he take it?” I ask.

“He’s okay,” says Sarah. “He was disappointed, but now it’s okay.”

The picnic is held every year at a bucolic farm in rural Maryland. As the sun sinks toward the oak-and-hickory forest to the west of the picnic grounds, gaggles of kids are running around in the grass. When they’re not squirming behind a National Geographic microphone, it’s easy to believe Mary Lee Elden’s contention that “these are normal kids who just happen to be bright.” There are games of horseshoes and pickup basketball going on. Kenji Golimlim, a finalist from the Detroit area, might be the shortest contestant in the bee—he barely comes up to my elbow, and I’m not a tall man—but I watch him happily shoot hoops on a ten-foot rim for quite a while. Most of these kids just met a day or two ago, but they seem to be fast friends already.

Beyond the pressure of the competition, it’s geography that welds them together. “People here understand what I’m talking about,” one boy tells me happily. “They’re people I can have geographical conversations with!” In this crowd, you don’t have to roll your eyes at Mom when she mentions the geography bee in front of your friends—it’s okay to be a maphead. Here, geography can even be an icebreaker. I overhear one of tomorrow’s finalists, Nicholas Farnsworth, meeting Roey Hadar, who represents New Jersey.

“Ah, you’re from New Jersey! Newark is its largest city. Population 273,000, last I saw.”

“High Point in Sussex County is 1,803 feet,” Roey replies. This sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

William Johnston, representing Mississippi, is a sixth-grader with a wide grin and a rite-of-passage bowl cut. “He invents countries where they play this imaginary game called plonk,” his mother tells me. “He spends months making up islands.” I make a mental note to introduce him to Benjamin. Until this weekend, William’s never really fit in with other kids. At his school, students can pass out birthday party invitations in class only if everyone has been invited. “Well, that’s the only time he ever got invited to a birthday party,” she sighs. “He’s just . . . different. But here he’s gotten some recognition, and it has been
great
.”

Like his fellow competitors, William is a detail-conscious kid, the kind who, even at two or three years old, needed to have all his Match-box cars lined up just so. “Little things upset him,” says his mom. “When Pluto was declared not a planet, he was just devastated.”

This is an important clue, I think, into the mind of a map-mad child. When I was young, maps represented stability to me in a turbulent world. No matter how traumatized I felt by starting a new school or moving to a new city or something scary on TV,
^*
all the places I knew still looked the same in an atlas. To this day, I’m thrown for a loop when maps change; I’ll expect it to be front-page news when Palau declares independence or Calcutta decides to start spelling its name “Kolkata.” In all my old geography trivia books, it was an article of faith that the highest wind speed ever recorded on the planet was 231 miles per hour, during a freak April storm on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington in 1934. I was recently shocked to learn that
the old record had been shattered
by twenty miles per hour during an Australian cyclone in 1996. Appallingly, the reading sat unseen in a computer log for fourteen years before scientists realized they had a new record on their hands! In my view, that cyclone should have been
breaking news on CNN. How is it that the fundamental parameters of the universe are changing and no one cares but me?
^*

To young eyes, maps do more than offer a vision of permanence. They also reduce the messy world to something that kids can understand—even, in a way, possess. For centuries, maps have been used as a symbol of human mastery over the world. When I visited Rome a few years ago, I was transfixed by the intricate frescoes of Italian and papal provinces in the Vatican’s Gallery of Maps. Each tree in every forest was separately drawn in receding profile, like Tolkien’s Mirk-wood. I later learned that Renaissance-era popes used the hall as an anteroom—while waiting for an audience with His Holiness, visitors were meant to be pondering the extent of his earthly influence, as well as his heavenly leverage. The round orb that traditionally accompanies the scepter and other regalia in a monarch’s crown jewels is a symbol of the globe, reminding subjects that their king or queen
literally
holds the whole world in his or her hands.
^†
In the twentieth century, a newly independent country would proudly publish its own national atlas as a sign that it had shrugged off the shackles of colonialism.

Whether you’re King Louis XVI or a bewildered modern-day seventh-grader, maps provide that same sense of confidence and ownership, that God’s-eye vantage on the world. Lilly Gaskin likes playing with maps, but she doesn’t really know yet that they represent places. These kids do know, and that’s what sharpens their enthusiasm. “On a map, you can see the whole expanse, even though you’re only in one part of it,” Caitlin Snaring told me. “You know where you’re going next.” Mary Lee Elden has noticed that the best geography bee contestants often come from small towns. The kids from Manhattan or L.A. or Washington already think the world revolves around them; it’s the ones from Minocqua, Wisconsin, or Flagstaff, Arizona, who are so ravenously driven to connect to the faraway places they see on maps.