RECKONING - Maphead - page 89

“Once we discovered she could do the things with the maps, she wanted to do it,” Nikki
adds. “It was a game. We would get tired of it way before she would get tired of it.” In
the YouTube video, in fact, you can hear Lilly's parents try to end the game three separate
times. “More!” Lilly always insists.
She's always been a prodigious memorizer, say her mom and dad. She's not reading yet,
but she knows every word of a hundred or so of her favorite topics. But discovering her
mapabilitywasanaccident.WhenherbeloveduncleBradyheadedtoTaiwanfortwoyears
to serve as a Mormon missionary,Lilly wanted to knowwhere he was. Her parents pointed
outTaiwanonamap—andweresurprisedtofind,thenexttimeLillysawthemap,thatshe
still remembered where Uncle Brady was.
Confirming my intuition that mapheads tend to be gifted spatially, Lilly needs no short-
cutstocorrectlyidentifyplacesonthemap.“Evenwhenshewasjustbarelytwo,shecould
do it on a topographical map, no borders or colors,” says James. “She could do it on a tiny
globe the size of a golf ball. It's not even the shapes, because she could do land-locked
countries like Mongolia.”
Lilly's remarkable knack is a powerful argument that geography geeks are born, not
made—that some of us come into the world with, in effect, a graticule of latitude and lon-
gitude predrawn on the otherwise blank slates of our minds. Her parents have tried the
“mapgame”outonheryoungersister,Maggie,aswell,buttonoavail;theirfirstchildwas
just wired differently. James and Nikki can see why the map game might appeal to Lilly
in particular: she's always been a detail-oriented child, prone to noticing—and freaking
out—if the power light on the DVD player is left on or the toy cupcakes in her plastic tray
areputbackinthewrongorder.“AlittleOCDthere,”admitsherdad.“Andinitially,itwas
the attention,” adds Mom. “She loves the clapping. That really helps her turn on her stuff.”
Accustomed to just a few pairs of hands clapping for her at home, Lilly seems awestruck
in her Oprah appearance to have an entire studio full of fans cheering her map skills. Eyes
wide, she can barely believe her good fortune.
Lilly will probably grow up to discover, as I did, that such moments of acclaim will be
few and far between. As useful and rewarding as map geekery can be, it's rarely honored,
or even noticed, by the outside world. But there's one glittering exception that provides a
nationalstageforAmerica'syounggeographybuffs,withmillionsparticipatingeveryyear:
the National Geographic Bee.
In 1988, the National Geographic Society was celebrating its centennial—and, in the
wake of the David Helgren-spawned media cycle about map illiteracy, was in the process
of refocusing its mission on geography education. Mary Lee Elden, an editor at National
Geographic's children's magazine World, suggested a geography contest for its readers.
The idea snowballed into anationwide geography competition modeled onthe Scripps Na-
tional Spelling Bee, and the society's board soon approved it as an annual event.