I asked my niece, Amy, the other day what she would be doing if she had not chosen international relations as a profession, if she had it to do all over again. "Geography," she said. "I'd study geography." I absolutely loved that idea, since I play that game all the time. Not sure I'd want to be a geographer professionally, but I would love to spend a good chunk of my childhood as a geography nerd. I've been doing that in recent months, as the destruction of Ukraine continues to dominate the news and I need to have other things to focus on.
"Poor Mexico," they say, "So far from God and so close to the United States." You'd have to say the same for Ukraine. At least we don't try to spread the fiction that Mexico is not a real place, that it's a part of the U.S., and we have the right to bite off chunks of it at will. (We did that when my home state of California was taken from them and turned into an anglo-saxon enclave, but that's another story.)
So are the blunders that Putin has made another story. But there is a tie-in with geography there too.
Just as the war criminal George W. Bush, who started a war in Iraq because he couldn't tell a Shia from a Sunni and missed the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Saudis... just as his war in Iraq killed an estimated 300,000 Iraqis, and considerably more if you add in the results of illness, disease, malnutrition and the like, and handed the Iranians a Shiite victory over their Sunni neighbors, Putin's war, waged to conquer Ukraine and push back against the growing specter of NATO on his doorstep ended up getting neutral Sweden and Finland to give up generations of neutrality and join NATO. These jokers are leaders?
The idiocies don't stop there. Putin tells his media-captivated countrymen he's fighting Nazis. The president of Ukraine, a guy recognized by both Ukrainians and most of the world as well as a national hero, is a Jew. Putin annexes much of Eastern Ukraine, where many people speak Russian as a first language. But they also would prefer life outside of Russian control, much as the citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Georgia, Kazakhstan and other former soviet republics do. And that's just the eastern half of Ukraine. The western half has long been more conspicuously anti-Russian, pro-European. There is such irony in the fact that Putin, just as he blundered by driving Sweden and Finland to want to join NATO, has managed to unite the Russian-speaking part of the country with the Ukrainian-speaking part against him.
I need to escape the intensity of the war news from time to time, and one of the things I have fun with is geography. I've been enjoying the fact that Google maps provides you with just about all the geography trivia you can handle.
Consider this: if you were to travel from the northernmost town in the U.S. to the southernmost town, how long would it take you by plane, car, bicycle or on foot?
If you took the most direct route, how many Canadian provinces would you go through and how many states?
I don't like playing guessing games when the answers are easily available, so I'll give you the answers. First off, you can walk the just over three miles from Prudhoe Bay (the northernmost town in the U.S.) to the Deadhorse Airport in Deadhorse, Alaska. That would take you about an hour. Or you could go by bicycle in about fifteen minutes. Or by car or taxi in about seven to ten.
From Deadhorse Airport (SCC) you would fly to Key West (EYW), stopping three times: in Anchorage (ANC), Seattle/Tacoma Airport (SEA) and George Bush International Airport in Houston. If you want to avoid any association with George Bush, you can pay $151 more and fly via Tampa, instead. Both Tampa and Houston have direct flights into Key West. Houston also has flights that touch down in Charlotte, Fort Worth or Miami along the way, but you can fly direct if you want to. Best get an experienced travel agent to give you the time it would take because there are many choices of routes and airlines, and the direct routes are not necessarily the cheapest. But I'd count on not getting there in less than twenty-one hours, and many take ten or more than that.
You could drive, of course, and that trip, a distance of 5487 miles (8830 km) would take you about 90 hours. A very hard nine days, driving ten hours a day, or a more reasonable two and a half weeks, more or less, driving about five hours a day.
And if you're hardy, and can handle the hills, you could go by bicycle. If you do that, you can cut about twenty-four miles off the journey, and do it in 5463 miles, or 8791 km. That should take you about 450 hours, give or take. That's forty-five ten-hour days, and since there are precious few athletes alive who could handle that, I'd suggest you allot three months, and cut that down to five-hours a day on the bicycle.
Then there's the third option: to hoof it. Don't know how that works those long initial miles through the Yukon Territory. I have no idea whether it's ever been done. It's 56 km from the first town, Beaver Creek, to the second town, Koidern, or about an eleven hour and a half walk. And if you make that, it's another 86.7 km to the next town, Quill Creek, or a seventeen and a half hour hike on foot. And those long treks don't end there. From Teslin, still in the Yukon, to the next town, Swift River, Yukon, a route which takes you into the Northern parts of British Columbia, it would take you over 23 hours. No thank you by a long shot. And we haven't begun to tap into the long endless treks through Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Northern Minnesota before you get to even slightly more populated places in Wisconsin (or Iowa - you can choose either route) and Illinois.
Once you get to Illinois you have to hike the entire state from north to south. Then you walk through a little part of Western Kentucky, and you get to Tennessee, another state you traverse from North to South. Then Georgia - again full trek North to South. Then Florida - again full trek North to South.
I suppose there are venturesome folk out there who might want to give it a go, but I've just completely wiped myself out, particularly now when it's all I can do to walk twenty minutes around a couple blocks here in Berkeley.
Those who can, do; those who can't, teach, we used to say; and somebody would usually pipe up, "And those who can't teach teach teachers how to teach."
I see a parallel here.
Those who can't walk anymore imagine walking from one end of Estados Unidos to the other, just for the hell of it.
Back now to the Netflix menu of mass shootings, car accidents, crime, corruption or social decay that seem to be all the rage these days.
Mine eyes have seen better days. I actually used to read ten or more hours a day, but now two is a real stretch.
And I used to be able to hike at least half that much.
You'll understand now why I've turned to Rachmaninoff and Chopin.
And, of course, Google maps.
Do you know how far it is from Lavry, in the Pskov District of Russia, right up next to Estonia, to the Big Diomede Island, from which (pace Sarah Palin) you can see the United States? Those are the westernmost and easternmost points in Russia. Google maps tells me, and I quote: Sorry, your search appears to be outside our current coverage area for driving.
I know it's about 8000 km and spans ten time zones, but I can't seem to find anybody who can tell me how long it would take to walk or bike it.
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