Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (23 page)

“The so-called winning question every year is actually a
losing
question,” explains Anders Knospe, sitting in the audience next to me. Anders signed quite a few autographs in his Bozeman, Montana, middle school after winning the 1994 bee; he’s returned fifteen years
later to reminisce and say hi to Mary Lee Elden and other bee organizers. He came down on the train from Yale, where he’s finishing up a PhD in physics.

“Look how calm they are,” I say. Grown men have been known to faint dead away from the stress of competing on
Jeopardy!,
but these middle schoolers have come through the quiz crucible with flying colors. Eric, on Alex’s left, has stayed perfectly poker-faced—aloof, even—through the entire finals. The cucumber, just like his parents said. Arjun has been more antsy throughout, a little more the awkward adolescent than the other nine finalists, exhaling visibly with relief in the tenth round when he stayed alive with a wild guess of Bogotá, Colombia, as the home of Plaza Bolívar. But now he too is staring at the paper in front of him with stony concentration.

Anders shakes his head. “I’m sure they’re very nervous,” he whispers, remembering his own final matchup. “I don’t know why I remember this, but there was a bead of sweat running from my shoulder all the way down my arm.”

“If you’re ready to go, here is question number one,” Alex begins. “Slavonia and Dalmatia are historic regions located in which present-day country?”

It’s one of the former Yugoslav republics, I know, but which one? Serbia? Croatia? Bosnia?

“Put your cards up,” prompts Alex. “The correct response is the one you have written down, Croatia. You are tied, one apiece. Here’s the next question. What is the local name given to the katabatic winds in southern France that can cause damage to crops in the Rhone Valley?”

Eric and Arjun both wrote “mistral.” “You are right once again,” says Alex. “This is going to be fun, isn’t it, folks? You can tell already.”

Sure enough, the round ends with neither finalist having missed a single question. They know that Kandy is in Sri Lanka; Zaragoza, Spain, on the Ebro; and Sochi, Russia, on the Black Sea. Alex pulls out a sheaf of tiebreaker questions. The first wrong answer now will end the bee.

“Located northwest of Qatar, Sitrah is a port city in what oil-exporting island country?” Eric’s parents are sitting in front of Arjun’s in the audience to my left. The Yangs seem as tranquil as their son.
The Kandaswamys are also motionless, but they’re sitting up ramrod straight with wide eyes, as if slightly aghast at the proceedings.

Eric pauses a moment before writing his answer, but both come up with “Bahrain,” so the final extends to a seventh question. “Akimiski Island is the largest island in a bay that also marks the southernmost extent of the territory of Nunavut. Name this bay.” Neither boy is suckered into answering “Hudson Bay”; both know that it’s James Bay.

The auditorium is silent; never before have so many people been so interested in the waterways of Nunavut. “You still have enough cards there?” asks Alex, smiling. “Yes? Good.”

Question eight. “Timiş County shares its name with a tributary of the Danube and is located in the western part of which European country?” There is a long pause this time before the Sharpies begin squeaking. Is it Hungary? The finalists seem just as unsure as I am.

There’s a low buzz from the spectators as the answers are revealed. “We notice that the boys have not come up with the same response this time,” says Alex dramatically. Arjun’s card says “Hungary,” which was my guess. Eric has written “Romania.”

Arjun is staring up at Alex as if he were about to impart some secret religious truth; Eric is staring fixedly ahead. “The country is Romania!” announces Alex. “Eric Yang, you are the 2009 National Geography Bee champion!”

The crowd erupts in applause. Arjun shakes his head bitterly into the palm of his right hand. “What a final!” marvels Alex. “What a final. Yes indeed.” Eric makes the smallest fist pump I’ve ever seen, a matter of millimeters, and then rests his chin on one knuckle, allowing a secretive smile to cross his face for the first time all day.

Aileen Yang is still crying fifteen minutes later, as I come up to congratulate them through the throng of newspaper reporters hoping for a quote from the champ.

“Eric, did you know Romania?” I ask.

“It was an educated guess,” he admits. He tried to picture the terrain of central Europe—where tributaries of the Danube were likely to arise, which way they might run. I’m impressed. He wasn’t just
regurgitating place-names, as the bee’s critics have claimed. He had a very deep knowledge of the region.

“How did it feel to win?” I want to know.

“It was pretty big,” he says quietly. “A major milestone.” Understated to the last.

I didn’t realize how badly I needed to meet the fifty-five bee kids until I watched them in action. After decades of news stories about young people stymied by simple maps, I had generalized their message into this not-unreasonable conclusion: all Americans suck at geography. It was therapeutic for me to see firsthand that some kids are still as map-crazy as I was, that the future might actually be in pretty good hands. “That’s what I like about the bee, that it’s the good news about education,” says Mary Lee Elden. “A lot of what you read in the paper is so negative. We need to reward kids who are doing well in academics. These kids aren’t going to get the football trophy or the basketball trophy, but they have something to offer the world, a lot to offer the world. And we should reward them.”

Success at the National Geographic Bee is a surprisingly accurate way to predict kids who will go on to do extraordinary things. Anders’s particle physics work at Yale is only the tip of the iceberg. Susannah Batko-Yovino, the first girl to win the bee, is now a doctor doing cancer research at the University of Maryland. Kyle Haddad-Fonda, who won in 2001, is studying Chinese-Egyptian relations at Harvard, and just earned a Rhodes scholarship. Caitlin Snaring’s goal is even loftier: she’s going to be secretary of state someday, she announced on the
Today
show. An autographed photo of Condoleezza Rice arrived in the Snaring mailbox in short order, as did a congratulatory letter from the president.

“But the spelling bee kids got to
meet
President Bush,” Caitlin’s mom tut-tutted as we looked at her framed souvenir. That was the first but not the last time I became aware of the uneasy inferiority complex that geography bee people have regarding the Scripps National Spelling Bee. They tend to get upset that a contest of
spelling,
of all things, gets more prestige and attention than geography, a subject
that—unlike spelling—is actually taught beyond the fifth grade, important in adult life, and unable to be easily automated by your word processor or e-mail client.

At the postfinals luncheon, even Alex Trebek reveals his secret spelling bee envy. “No one’s asked me to speak, but I’m going to speak anyway,” he says, leaning back in his chair. After a few glasses of Char-donnay, he’s expansive, telling the room about his basement full of
National Geographic
magazines, which he rereads endlessly. “I don’t mean to put down the spelling bee, but if the spelling bee can get prime time on ABC, we’re better than they are. We’re more interesting and broader in scope. My gosh, we should have a prime-time show like that.”

But whether the public ever catches on or not, Alex’s plans are to host the bee in perpetuity. “I’ll keep doing it till they have to wheel me out like the terra-cotta man,” he vows.

In ten years, who knows? Maybe he’ll be handing the giant check to YouTube’s Lilly Gaskin on national television. Just imagine the applause she’ll hear then.

Chapter 8
MEANDER

n
.:
a sinuous bend in a river or other watercourse

You have to fly around the world all day
to keep the sun upon your face.

—STEPHEN MERRITT

T
he oldest surviving road atlases were designed to keep people from having to go anywhere at all. When a medieval cartographer like Matthew Paris drew beautifully illuminated maps of holy places and the roads that led there, he was largely targeting an audience of his fellow monks, who would pore over every step of the journey
without ever leaving their monasteries
. They were believers in
peregrinatio in stabilitate
: pilgrimages of the heart, not of the feet. Armchair travel was fine—not that any of these monks would have been allowed anything as comfy as an armchair—but if you actually undertook the trip, just think of all the seductive and licentious temptations that might await you on the road! Well, don’t think about them too much, brothers. Let us pray.

Even if you didn’t have ecclesiastical reasons to stay close to home, a map of Rome would have been about as useful as a map of Mars. During the Middle Ages, most people lived, worked, married, and died without ever going farther than twenty miles from their place of birth. If you were that rare ambitious soul who actually did dream of travel beyond your home county, your lifetime checklist was probably a single pilgrimage: Canterbury, say, or Santiago de Compostela, or Jerusalem.
That was it. If there had been a travel best seller in the fifteenth century, it might have been called
One Place to See Before You Die
.

That was pretty much the state of travel for the next five hundred years. When Lord Castlereagh founded the Travellers Club in London in 1819, its membership was limited to gentlemen so well traveled that they had to have been—can you believe it?—five hundred miles from London. Yep, five hundred miles. A single ski trip to St. Moritz, and you too could sip cognac in the oak-paneled Travellers Club library alongside the Duke of Wellington and explorers like Sir Francis Beaufort and Captain Robert FitzRoy of the
Beagle
.

A transportation revolution—mass rail transit in the nineteenth century and then air travel in the twentieth—changed all that. For the first time in human history, it’s possible to go virtually everywhere. And so people have. The north face of Mount Everest, one of the least hospitable places on the planet, was completely untouched by human hands until 1921. It’s now so overcrowded that climbing teams send up Sherpas weeks ahead of time to grab primo spots, like teenagers camping out overnight to snag concert tickets, and
international cleanup efforts
have been needed to remove trash from the cluttered slopes.

The jet age has given birth to a new kind of connoisseur: the geographically inclined
collector
. These are not collectors of things, of baseball cards or Fiestaware or
Happy Days
action figures, but of places. You can’t go every place on Earth, of course, not even with twenty-first-century technology. After all, the playing field is 200 million square miles in area. So the completist traveler will specialize: visiting not every place but the highest point on every continent, or every U.S. county or state capital, or every Denny’s, or . . . the possibilities are endless.

There are tens of thousands of these place collectors wandering the globe, but they all have something in common: they all pretend that the checklist is incidental to the journey, but they all know deep down that’s not true. The list is crucial.

Louise McGregor is a quiet, gray-haired woman in her sixties who looks like your grandma. Unlike your grandma, she
really
had her heart
set on a trip to Somalia. “They wouldn’t let me off the plane in Mogadishu!” she is complaining to a gaggle of women in the noisy bar of a swanky Beverly Hills prime rib restaurant. “All the Somalis got off, but when we tried, ‘Where do you think
you’re
going?’” Somalia has been a chaotic no-man’s-land of anarchy and bloodshed for years, but Louise seems genuinely miffed at the slight. She was able to cross off Djibouti and Yemen on her recent trip to the Horn of Africa, but not Somalia.

“Have you ever been someplace where you felt like you were genuinely in danger?” I ask.

“Of course! I’ve lived in New York and L.A.”

Come on. I wouldn’t really stack smog and traffic up against suicide bombs, beheadings, and pirates.

She shrugs. “The most fun places just aren’t safe. My friend and I look at the State Department list of dangerous places, and that’s how we choose where to go.”

The modern-day American version of the Travellers Club is the Travelers’ Century Club, founded in 1954 in southern California by Bert Hemphill and Russ Davidson, who worked together in an elite L.A. travel agency catering to people looking for very posh trips to very unusual destinations. “Century” refers to the club’s exclusivity rule: you must have visited at least one hundred different countries to join. The idea was that this would be a nearly insurmountable goal, but forty-three charter members had qualified by the time the decade was out. “It turns out one hundred wasn’t all that difficult, even back then,” says Klaus Billep, club chairman for the past twenty years.