Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (6 page)

I loved it anyway, but I felt very keenly that I had been transplanted; it’s hard not to feel like a stranger in a strange land when you’re the only American kid in a vast Korean apartment complex. Expatriates thrive on this sense of bold outsiderness, and it bonds
them into tightly knit communities. But it isolates them from their homeland as well. My family would spend a month or so every summer on home leave in the States, just long enough to be reminded of what we were missing, before we had to hop wistfully on a plane back . . . where? Home? For the next decade, when people asked me where I was from, I would automatically say, “Seattle,” even though I never spent more than two or three weeks a year there. This was pregrunge, and nobody thought Seattle was a particularly hip place to be from, so I wasn’t being a poseur—I just didn’t want to deal with the follow-up of having to explain why, despite all appearances, a white kid was claiming to be Korean. The sociologist Ruth Hill Useem coined the term “
Third Culture Kids
” to refer to nationality-confused global nomads like me, because, she said, we fuse our birth culture and our adopted culture into some entirely new, blended culture. But I didn’t necessarily feel like a man without a country. I knew where home was; I just wasn’t living there.

I’ve never thought about it until now, but my obsession with maps coincided almost exactly with the move overseas. I wasn’t traumatized by the news that we were going; just insatiably curious. Driving home from a movie with my parents that summer (I’m oddly certain it was Disney’s
The Fox and the Hound
), my brother and I peppered them with questions about the upcoming move: What country would we be living in? Which city? There were
two
Koreas? Were we going to the north one or the south one? Crossing an ocean made me feel like an explorer; I wanted maps to explain this suddenly larger world. I bought my very first atlas from the only English-language bookstore in Seoul during our first months there.

But I also know that I spent just as much time looking at maps of the United States, looking backward. Maps became a way to reconnect with the country I’d left behind. And not just the Pacific Northwest but all of it, even places I’d never seen. I was annoyed by a kiddie atlas I’d been given that showed only three cities in the entire state of Delaware. (I can still name them: Wilmington, Dover, Newark.) When I finally got my hands on a Rand McNally U.S. road atlas, I relished the detail, planning imaginary road trips along open highways that seemed so unlike the cramped, noisy urban quarters where
we now found ourselves. I recited the tiny towns of Delaware as if they were the most exotic names imaginable: Milford, Laurel, Harrington, Lewes.
^*
To me, half a world away, they
were
exotic.

Fast-forward two decades. Mindy and I were living in Salt Lake City and happily settled, but I suddenly found myself working from home, and we realized that, as a result, we could really be living anywhere we liked. New York? Europe? Where would you go if you could go anyplace? We’d visited Seattle a couple times over the years, and I’d always cleverly arranged these visits for the summertime, when Seattle likes to fool out-of-towners by not drizzling three weeks out of every month. Mindy fell for it; she wasn’t “imprinted” on the Pacific Northwest like me, but it was growing on her. I proposed a trip up to Washington and Oregon to see how we felt about moving there. It was May, and everything—even the parking lot of the extended-stay hotel where we were encamped—smelled like rain and cedar. Nine days later we put down an offer on a house outside Seattle, where we still live happily today.

“
To be rooted
,” wrote Simone Weil, “is perhaps the most important and the least recognized need of the human soul.” It took twenty-five years—longer than the Manx shearwater, longer even than the loggerhead sea turtle—but I finally found my way back home.

Chapter 3
FAULT

n
.:
a fracture in the earth’s crust, along
which parallel displacement occurs

To the people of Bolivia!

—RONALD REAGAN, OFFERING
A 1982 TOAST—IN BRASILIA

O
n the very first day of the University of Miami’s spring semester in 1983, assistant professor
David Helgren sprang
a pop quiz in his introductory geography classes. He gave each of his 128 students, mostly business and liberal arts majors, a blank world map. They were to pinpoint the locations of thirty different places, ranging from the obvious (Miami, London, the South Pacific) to the then-newsworthy (the USSR, the Falkland Islands) to the slightly more exotic (New Guinea, Cairo). They didn’t need to write their names on their papers but were instructed to try their best.

Dr. Helgren, a five-year veteran of freshman geography instruction, wasn’t expecting the students to blow him out of the water with their astute global knowledge. As a rule, geography professors are pretty cynical about the public’s command of geography. (In your school days, did you assume your teachers were all gossiping about your personal ineptness in smoke-filled break rooms? Well, you were probably right.) But if the scores were lousy, at least the department could use them to seek increased university funding for geography instruction. Helgren could give his students a similar quiz at the end
of the semester as a way to benchmark their improvement. He was coming up for tenure soon, after all.

But when the results came back, even Helgren was a little shocked. He had graded the maps, he thought, pretty leniently, but more than half his students still couldn’t find Chicago. Or Iceland or Quebec or the Amazon rain forest. Fewer than one in three knew where Moscow and Sydney were. Eleven of his Miami students had even misplaced Miami! It’s hard to imagine an easier item on a test like this than the city where all the students live, unless you add two more items—“Your Ass” and “A Hole in the Ground”—and give credit to anyone who doesn’t mark them in exactly the same spot. Helgren circulated the depressing scores to his dean and a few other campus contacts but heard nothing back. He assumed that was the end of the story.

A month later, the student newspaper wrote a small article on the quiz, a first tiny domino in the unlikely chain that would completely change Helgren’s life. Both local Miami papers picked up on the story in
The Miami Hurricane
and sent reporters to interview Helgren. Viewing this as an opportunity to put in a good word for his field, Helgren waxed expansive to both reporters about America’s widespread problems in geography education. The next day was February 14, Valentine’s Day. All hell broke loose.

“This was a really dull news day,” David Helgren remembers. “It was a Tuesday. Did you ever notice there’s no news on Tuesdays?”

Decades after his brush with fame, I’ve tracked Helgren down at his Salinas, California, home on a bluff overlooking miles of strawberry and lettuce fields. You can guess at his academic specialty—African deserts and archaeology—just by walking through his home, which is full of antelope horns and tribal masks. (“My wife is Afrikaner,” he says, and I wonder briefly if, in his shoes, I’d be able to resist the temptation to always tell people, “My wife is a Boer” instead.) A zebra skin hangs above the dining room table where we’re talking. Now sixty-two years old, Helgren is a big man with piercing blue eyes and a snowy beard, and he strokes his pet cat pensively as he talks, like a Bond villain.

“So I wake up that morning, and I’m getting phone calls. I have the London papers calling me at home before seven
A.M.
because they’re in a different time zone. I didn’t know what the hell was going on! I’d never been interviewed by a newspaper in my life. I was a reclusive academic.”

The
Miami Herald,
it seemed, had titled its story, “Where in the World Is London? 42% Tested at UM Didn’t Know.” When that headline came across the wire, the British papers jumped at the story, which was also spreading across the United States as the sun moved westward. Soon every national network wanted an interview. The overrun media relations people at the university called Helgren in a panic. “They said, ‘Come into your office and try to look respectable!’ So they put a globe in front of me and a map on the wall. I was wearing a tie, which was very not like me.” He spent the entire day soberly lecturing TV news crews on the importance of geography. The camera crew from NBC’s Miami affiliate happened to be an international news team, on an R&R break from covering the contras in Nicaragua. They were savvy. After getting their sound bites from Helgren, they hurried over to the giant swimming-pool complex at the heart of the Miami campus and started asking good-looking kids in swimsuits where Chicago was. As the camera rolled, one unconcerned but well-muscled young man told them, “Well, I don’t know where it is, but I can look it up.” Journalistic gold!

Helgren was hustled onto a plane to New York—
Good Morning America
had decided to do a story about map illiteracy. While he was in the air, all three Miami networks were airing their news pieces, and just about every newspaper in the English-speaking world was preparing a story or a scolding editorial on the “crisis.” Johnny Carson was making map jokes in his monologue. The next morning, Helgren was the biggest news
Good Morning America
had, so he got the prime morning-show spot: ten minutes after eight o’clock. At the exact same time, over at the
Today
show, they were running clips from the previous night’s NBC interview. No matter which channel Americans were tuned to,
^*
they were seeing David Helgren.

After showing the clip in which the tanned himbo confessed to not knowing where Chicago was, the
Today
show’s Bryant Gumbel remarked to the camera, “Well, you know, some folks down there call that place ‘Suntan U.’”

Ouch. By the time Helgren returned home to Miami, the residents had the torches and pitchforks ready. His wife fielded anonymous threatening phone calls to their home number. “My daughter is not a dummy!” one Hurricane mom blustered. “I’m going to have you fired!” The university president called the incident “very unfortunate,” and a group of law students threatened to sue Helgren, the university, and even Bryant Gumbel for all the loss of future income they’d undoubtedly suffer. (“Why didn’t you make partner last year, Bob?” “Oh, you know, the usual. Bryant Gumbel.”) The campus public relations staff had been working that year to rebrand Miami, long sensitive to its reputation as a party school, as “a global university in a global city,” so the media circus came at the worst possible time. One miffed publicist even compared
l’affaire Helgren
to the famous case a decade earlier in which a Miami researcher had
kidnapped a young woman
at gunpoint, then buried her in a fiberglass box in rural Georgia.

“I was in the worst shit ever, from the institution and the city,” Helgren tells me. It’s been twenty-five years, but he still looks completely bewildered as he describes his unwitting career suicide, the result of a few geographically inept undergrads and one slow news day. “At any other campus, this wouldn’t have been an issue. That’s the weirdness of Miami. It’s essentially a freak show in American culture.”

Though Helgren had been awarded a quarter of a million dollars in grants for his research—“more than anyone had ever got in the whole place,” he says—and was up for promotion, he learned the following year that he’d be out of a job in May. A colleague who had stood up for him in the media, Jim Curtis, was dismissed a month later. The university denied that the map-illiteracy kerfuffle had anything to do with the firings. As a consolation prize, at least the Helgren story got the
National Enquirer
to run a nice, serious piece on geographic illiteracy. It appeared right between an article on a Turkish woman whose
left hand weighed forty pounds and an interview with an expert who claimed that 20 percent of America’s dogs and cats are space aliens.

David Helgren wasn’t the first to discover, of course, that lots of people are pretty lousy at geography. In fact, geographical ignorance is such an engrained part of our culture that it’s become an easy bit of comedy shorthand for ditziness, the same way you might show a character wearing a barrel with suspenders to represent poverty. Marilyn Monroe, in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
insisted that she wanted to visit “Europe, France”; fifty years later, Sacha Baron Cohen deployed the exact same joke on
Da Ali G Show,
annoying his United Nations tour guide by complaining about the fact that Africa isn’t a U.N. member. Joey on
Friends
thought that the Netherlands was where Peter Pan lived, and Bart Simpson was once surprised to discover the large Southern Hemisphere country of “Rand McNally” on his sister Lisa’s globe.