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

longer (“Ho Chi Minh City”). “I’m looking up at Alex, because he’s looking at both our answers. He looks at Suneil’s, and he’s like, hmm.” Caitlin mimicked a Trebekian scowl. “Then he looks at mine, and he looks at me . . . and he winks. I was like, whoa! ”
    I was a little jealous. Alex Trebek never winked at me.
    After themed rounds on current events, wildlife, and medicine, I head upstairs to the Diplomat Room to watch a different cohort of young geographers. Representing Washington State at this year’s bee is none other than Benjamin Salman, the boy with a whole country in his head. He’s up first in each round and stands at the microphone smiling placidly, with his arms folded. He hasn’t missed a question yet—he knows where Dagestan is, where vicuñas live, the largest city in North Africa. (Spoilers: Russia, Peru, Cairo.) Since each player is asked a different question in each round, there’s an element of chance underlying the skill. “You’ll hear everybody else’s questions and think, ‘That’s such an easy question!’” Caitlin told me. “But then it comes to you, and it’ll be the only one you didn’t know.” One player in this round is asked to identify the country where there’s fighting going on in Ramadi and Fallujah (Iraq; you may have heard about it), but the next oneneeds to locate Hyesan, capital of the Yanggang Province. (Hyesan is a minor industrial city in North Korea, making this a very hard question indeed.) It’s the luck of the draw.
    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 topof 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