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fame may not have lasted much more than the Warhol-allotted fifteen minutes, but “geographic illiteracy” is still in the spotlight almost three decades later. He didn’t create the meme, but he was the one who moved it from the back pages of educational journals to the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, and from there it became a movement. Other schools and pollsters began conducting their own regular place-name surveys. Good Morning America hired Helgren’s former Miami colleague Harm de Blij as its on-air “geography editor.” A 1985 computer game called Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, full of geography facts and bundled with a copy of The World Almanac, became America’s best-selling educational game. A couple years later, PBS wanted to develop a geography program for children but didn’t have the budget for a full-fledged geoversion of Sesame Street. So the network adapted Carmen into a successful game show, which taught kids geography basics for the next five years.

Helgren also worked with the National Geographic Society, which at the time was facing a bit of an identity crisis: professional geographers tended to sneer at the magazine for being insufficiently academic, and the publication’s core competency—delivering colorful photos of exotic locales to curious lay readers—didn’t seem quite as fresh in 1984 as it had in 1924. (As a means of delivering pictures of topless women to curious young boys, it was still unparalleled, but that market was probably shrinking too, thank you very much, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.) The Helgren news cycle galvanized the society into taking on the new mission of geographic education—lobbying Washington, developing new curricula, and providing schools with millions of free maps. As of 2008, National Geographic’s Education Foundation had spent more than $100 million to return geography to the nation’s schools. At the time of its founding, only five states required the teaching of geography; today, all fifty states have geoliteracy standards. But still, more than half of the young adults in National Geographic’s last poll say they’ve never taken a single geography course. We’re not there yet, but—thanks in large part to David Helgren’s accidental celebrity—some of the smartest people in the nation are working on the problem.

Being a geography buff, or even a one-eyed geography buff in a nation of the blind, isn’t easy. I was mystified as a child to read about adults—college-educated adults!—who couldn’t point out the United States on a world map. I was accustomed to the fact that not all of my odd little obsessions were shared by the general public, but geography was the only case where I had to read headline after headline about America’s mass dismissal of what I held so dear. But we try not to take it personally, we mapheads. Maybe it makes some of us a little smug, to be so obviously superior to the unwashed masses who couldn’t tell Equatorial Guinea from Papua New Guinea if their lives depended on it. But in my experience, most of us just want to be helpful: we like to give directions to confused tourists, and tell our Trivial Pursuit teammates that the Caspian Sea is the world’s largest lake, and explain where Bangladesh is every time CNN says it’s flooding again. We’re not as important a public utility as we were in the days before Google and GPS, but we’re not going to change now. Deep down, we naively believe that everyone could fall in love with maps the way we did. They just haven’t given them a chance yet.

Chapter 4

BENCHMARKS

n.: brass disks set in concrete to indicate elevation,

used as a reference for topographical surveying

This information is what we need, you know. This shows history

and how people fit the places they occupy. It’s about what gets erased

and what comes to replace it. These maps reveal the foundations

behind the ephemera.

—BARRY LOPEZ

To enter the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, you need to mess with Texas: set in the tile floor of the entryway is a circular detail from a geologic map of the Lone Star