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

to the last.
    I didn’t realize how badly I needed to meet the fifty-five bee kids until I watched them in action. After decades of news stories about young people stymied by simple maps, I had generalized their message into this not-unreasonable conclusion: all Americans suck at geography. It was therapeutic for me to see firsthand that some kids are still as map-crazy as I was, that the future might actually be in pretty good hands. “That’s what I like about the bee, that it’s the good news about education,” says Mary Lee Elden. “A lot of what you read in the paper is so negative. We need to reward kids who are doing well in academics. These kids aren’t going to get the football trophy or the basketball trophy, but they have something to offer the world, a lot to offer the world. And we should reward them.”
    Success at the National Geographic Bee is a surprisingly accurate way to predict kids who will go on to do extraordinary things. Anders’s particle physics work at Yale is only the tip of the iceberg. Susannah Batko-Yovino, the first girl to win the bee, is now a doctor doing cancer research at the University of Maryland. Kyle Haddad-Fonda, who won in 2001, is studying Chinese-Egyptian relations at Harvard, and just earned a Rhodes scholarship. Caitlin Snaring’s goal is even loftier: she’s going to be secretary of state someday, she announced on the Today show. An autographed photo of Condoleezza Rice arrived in the Snaring mailbox in short order, as did a congratulatory letter from the president.
    “But the spelling bee kids got to meet President Bush,” Caitlin’s mom tut-tutted as we looked at her framed souvenir. That was the first but not the last time I became aware of the uneasy inferiority complex that geography bee people have regarding the Scripps National Spelling Bee. They tend to get upset that a contest of spelling, of all things, gets more prestige and attention than geography, a subjectthat—unlike spelling—is actually taught beyond the fifth grade, important in adult life, and unable to be easily automated by your word processor or e-mail client.
    At the postfinals luncheon, even Alex Trebek reveals his secret spelling bee envy. “No one’s asked me to speak, but I’m going to speak anyway,” he says, leaning back in his chair. After a few glasses of Char-donnay, he’s expansive, telling the room about his basement full of National Geographic magazines, which he rereads endlessly. “I don’t mean to put down the spelling bee, but if the spelling bee can get prime time on ABC, we’re better than they are. We’re more interesting and broader in scope. My gosh, we should have a prime-time show like that.”
    But whether the public ever catches on or not, Alex’s plans are to host the bee in perpetuity. “I’ll keep doing it till they have to wheel me out like the terra-cotta man,” he vows.
    In ten years, who knows? Maybe he’ll be handing the giant check to YouTube’s Lilly Gaskin on national television. Just imagine the applause she’ll hear then.

Chapter 8
MEANDER
    n .: a sinuous bend in a river or other watercourse
    You have to fly around the world all day
to keep the sun upon your face.
—STEPHEN MERRITT
    T he oldest surviving road atlases were designed to keep people from having to go anywhere at all. When a medieval cartographer like Matthew Paris drew beautifully illuminated maps of holy places and the roads that led there, he was largely targeting an audience of his fellow monks, who would pore over every step of the journey without ever leaving their monasteries . They were believers in peregrinatio in stabilitate : pilgrimages of the heart, not of the feet. Armchair travel was fine—not that any of these monks would have been allowed anything as comfy as an armchair—but if you actually undertook the trip, just think of all the seductive and licentious temptations that might await you on the road! Well, don’t think about them too much, brothers.