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By Root 874 0

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

On 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