Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks Read Online Free Page 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.
    At the picnic, the light is almost gone, the cookies are almost gone, and the bee parents gather up their kids. The last thing I see before I board my bus back to D.C. is William Johnston and Benjamin Salman, the two architects of imaginary nations, walking together in the twilight, their heads down, talking seriously and animatedly to each other. I have a feeling that the game of plonk is about to arrive on the shores of Alambia.
    I expect to hear the familiar National Geographic TV trumpet fanfare the next morning as I walk through the doors of the society’s headquarters between L and M Streets. That’s how “National Geographic” the lobby is: big wise yellow rectangles looming above me on the window glass like the monolith in 2001, a bathysphere and a sculpture of a silverback gorilla on exhibit to my right, Egyptian hieroglyphics and coral reef photos on the elevator doors. The hall outside Grosvenor Auditorium, * where the finals will be held, has a ceiling pricked with artificial stars, re-creating the constellations as they appeared on the night of January 27, 1888, when the society was founded.
    I take a moment to chat with the parents of Eric Yang of Texas,who made an early mistake in Benjamin Salman’s room during the prelims but bounced back to make the finals. A decade ago, the Yangs emigrated from Singapore, where, I tell them, my family once lived. His mom, Aileen, takes the opportunity to brag about her evidently well-balanced son: he plays jazz piano, earned a 2200 on his SATs at age thirteen, and made the state swimming team. He reads cookbooks obsessively, she says, but doesn’t like to cook much. He dreams of someday going to Belgium. Eric stands by impassively while his litany of accomplishments is paraded before me.
    “Your son seems pretty calm,” I tell Aileen. “We say he’s a cucumber!” she agrees, presumably in the “cool-as-a” sense, unless this is some Singaporean vegetable metaphor of which I’m unaware.
    “Are you all nervous about the finals?” I ask Aileen.
    She shakes her head. “He says, ‘Mom, I don’t have to be a winner. Winning is a blessing.’ “
    As I make my way to my seat, I’m stopped by another proud finalist parent, Lorena Golimlim, whose son Kenji was the four-foot-nothing basketball player I’d watched the night before. “Kenji! Can you recite the first two hundred digits of pi for Ken?” He does, with relish.
    Apart from Nicholas Farnsworth of Arizona and Kennen Sparks of Utah, all today’s finalists are Asian American, mostly of South Asian descent. This isn’t unexpected; Indian American culture so values this kind of educational success that a nonprofit called the North South Foundation has organized an elaborate farm system for Indian bee nerds, holding mock spelling bees, geography bees, and math Olympiads through its seventy-odd chapters nationwide. A more troublesome demographic challenge for National Geographic is the fact that all ten finalists—and fifty-three of the fifty-five national contestants this year—are boys. Only Alaska and Wyoming, the two least populous states in the last census, are represented by girls.
    At the picnic, I asked Wyoming’s Kirsi Anselmi-Stith about the disparity, which she chalked up to the social pressures of her age. She shrugged. “The girls are in makeup by now,” she said. “It’s not cool to be a geographer.”
    “Is it hard being one of the only girls?”
    She grinned. “No, it’s more entertaining. When we walk in