Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks Read Online Free

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 beenbreaking 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