RECKONING - Maphead - page 93

wardly thinking, “What a nut!”) She made checklists of places and topics that hadn't come
up in a while, figuring they had a better chance of appearing next year. She traded tips
online with fellow bee veterans: track down an Australian atlas called Geographica, they
said, or a children's atlas published by Dorling Kindersley. When she realized that lots of
beequestionscamefrom National Geographic magazine,shebeganannotatingeveryissue
in highlighter. On the plane to D.C. for her big rematch, she came across a mention of the
fishing fleet on the Italian island of Lampedusa and neatly marked it in yellow pen. Sure
enough, a Lampedusa question popped up in the finals. Right on schedule.
Caitlin breezed through her second bee without missing a single question. In her final
showdownagainstSuneilIyerofKansas,thefifthquestionaskedforthecapitalofimperial
Vietnam. She wrote “Hue” and could tell from the time that Suneil was taking that he was
writing something much, much longer (“Ho Chi Minh City”). “I'm looking up at Alex, be-
cause he's looking at both our answers. He looks at Suneil's, and he's like, hmm.” Caitlin
mimickedaTrebekianscowl.“Thenhelooksatmine,andhelooksatme...andhewinks.
I was like, whoa! ”
I was a little jealous. Alex Trebek never winked at me.
After themed rounds on current events, wildlife, and medicine, I head upstairs to the
Diplomat Room to watch a different cohort of young geographers. Representing Wash-
ington State at this year's bee is none other than Benjamin Salman, the boy with a whole
country in his head. He's up first in each round and stands at the microphone smiling pla-
cidly,withhisarmsfolded.Hehasn'tmissedaquestionyet—heknowswhereDagestanis,
where vicuñas live, the largest city in North Africa. (Spoilers: Russia, Peru, Cairo.) Since
each player is asked a different question in each round, there's an element of chance un-
derlying the skill. “You'll hear everybody else's questions and think, 'That's such an easy
question!'” Caitlin told me. “But then it comes to you, and it'll be the only one you didn't
know.” One player in this round is asked to identify the country where there's fighting go-
ing on in Ramadi and Fallujah (Iraq; you may have heard about it), but the next one needs
to locate Hyesan, capital of the Yanggang Province. (Hyesan is a minor industrial city in
North Korea, making this a very hard question indeed.) It's the luck of the draw.
Of course, all questions are easy if you know them and hard if you don't. Benjamin
knows that Majuro is the capital of the Marshall Islands, which impresses the heck out of
me, but records his first miss when he says that karst landscapes are shaped by volcanic
activity,notwatererosion.Buteverybody,itseems,hassomeblindspothere:EricYangof
TexasmissesaquestiononJapan'sMountAsama,andHenryGlitzofPennsylvaniamisses
his question in the dreaded analogies round, which contestants shiver and tell ghost stories
about.Evenforthemap-inclined,thisroundreallyisanightmare;imagineifyourSATtest
was full of questions like