Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [64]
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 in college 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 geography bee in front of your friends—it’s okay to be a maphead. Here, geography can even be an icebreaker. I overhear one of tomorrow’s finalists, Nicholas Farnsworth, meeting Roey Hadar, who represents New Jersey.
“Ah, you’re from New Jersey! Newark is its largest city. Population 273,000, last I saw.”
“High Point in Sussex County is 1,803 feet,” Roey replies. This sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
William Johnston, representing Mississippi, is a sixth-grader with a wide grin and a rite-of-passage bowl cut. “He invents countries where they play this imaginary game called plonk,” his mother tells me. “He spends months making up islands.” I make a mental note to introduce him to Benjamin. Until this weekend, William’s never really fit in with other kids. At his school, students can pass out birthday party invitations in class only if everyone has been invited. “Well, that’s the only time he ever got invited to a birthday party,” she sighs. “He’s just . . . different. But here he’s gotten some recognition, and it has been great.”
Like his fellow competitors, William is a detail-conscious kid, the kind who, even at two or three years old, needed to have all his Match-box cars lined up just so. “Little things upset him,” says his mom. “When Pluto was declared not a planet, he was just devastated.”
This is an important clue, I think, into the mind of a map-mad child. When I was young, maps represented stability to me in a turbulent world. No matter how traumatized I felt by starting a new school or moving to a new city or something scary on TV,* all the places I knew still looked the same in an atlas. To this day, I’m thrown for a loop when maps change; I’ll expect it to be front-page news when Palau declares independence or Calcutta decides to start spelling its name “Kolkata.” In all my old geography trivia books, it was an article of faith that the highest wind speed ever recorded on the planet was 231 miles per hour, during a freak April storm on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington