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

Vansh asks. “Yes!” comes a unanimous chorus of replies. The conversation moves on to the tides in the Bay of Fundy.
    They all seem lively and relaxed, whether they’re finalists like Vansh and Shiva or nearly-made-its like their friend across the aisle, South Dakota’s Alex Kimn. They’re not sitting with their parents anymore, and the contrast to the high-strung little huddles in the hotel lobby this morning is remarkable. This is band-of-brothers camaraderie, this is furlough from the parental grind.
    “So were you guys nervous today?” I turn around to ask.
    There is general scorn. “I think being nervous is funny,” says Alex.
    “What about your parents? Are they more nervous than you?”
    “ Oh, yes.” “Yes yes yes!” “Definitely.”
    I’m sitting next to Doug Oetter, the geography professor who helps run the Georgia state bee. Seeing students excel at geography is a pleasant switch for him. “My college students are geeked out to the max,” he says—proficient, thanks to AP exams, in genetics, cell structure, amino acids, electron shells. “But you ask them about basic geography or earth science—cumulus clouds or biomes—and they’re clueless. I literally have to start with longitude and latitude. They don’t know what causes the changing of the seasons, or the tides.” Just like ancient civilizations creating legends about pomegranates and things to explain natural phenomena, I think. Except that these kids probably don’t care that they don’t know.
    Academic geographers actually criticized the idea of the bee when National Geographic first announced it, sure that it would hurt the prestige of geography to reduce it to the status of mere facts, spelling-bee fodder. “ Rote memorization must be emphasized as the level of competitive difficulty increases,” predicted Marc Eichen of Queens College in one geography journal. “The geographic facts would need to become increasingly trivial to produce a winner.”
    But Oetter disagrees. You can’t write without learning the alphabet first, he says, and you can’t do sophisticated work in geography if you don’t know where places are. “These kids are going to show up incollege already knowing that alphabet. They’re going to write the geographic novels of tomorrow.”
    Behind us, tomorrow’s scholars are currently trying to figure out which way the bus is headed, with the help of Shiva’s compass watch. There is also some disagreement on the identity of the world’s leading gold producer. “South Africa! No, China. Yeah, yeah, China.”(Correct. China passed South Africa in 2008.)
    Encouraged by how quickly the kids on the bus seem to have decompressed, I track down Benjamin Salman’s mom, Sarah, at the picnic. She’s balancing a plate of barbecue on one knee.
    “How’d he take it?” I ask.
    “He’s okay,” says Sarah. “He was disappointed, but now it’s okay.”
    The picnic is held every year at a bucolic farm in rural Maryland. As the sun sinks toward the oak-and-hickory forest to the west of the picnic grounds, gaggles of kids are running around in the grass. When they’re not squirming behind a National Geographic microphone, it’s easy to believe Mary Lee Elden’s contention that “these are normal kids who just happen to be bright.” There are games of horseshoes and pickup basketball going on. Kenji Golimlim, a finalist from the Detroit area, might be the shortest contestant in the bee—he barely comes up to my elbow, and I’m not a tall man—but I watch him happily shoot hoops on a ten-foot rim for quite a while. Most of these kids just met a day or two ago, but they seem to be fast friends already.
    Beyond the pressure of the competition, it’s geography that welds them together. “People here understand what I’m talking about,” one boy tells me happily. “They’re people I can have geographical conversations with!” In this crowd, you don’t have to roll your eyes at Mom when she mentions the