THE GEOGRAPHY
I was born in Beckenham, then in the county of Kent, within 0.2 minutes of longitude of the Greenwich meridian: that line that sets the time of day for the whole world. Longitude tends to pass under the radar. People talk about latitude because it relates to climate; north cold, south hot (or not). If I travel North from Beckenham up longitude 0° the line, after quitting the English shore near Withernsea in Yorkshire, touches no land before the North Pole. Going south, it crosses the Mediterranean coast of North Africa just east of Arzew in Algeria and meets the sea again at Accra, in Ghana. Kwasi sweltering in Accra, Mahmood under the unflinching light of the Sahara, me in the drizzle of Beckenham and a lonely white bear chewing on the Russian flag fluttering over the ice at the North Pole: we all live on the Greenwich line.
How different if we travel longitudinally. From Beckenham, at 51° 24’ N, the line passes westwards to cross the English coast just north of Weston-super-Mare. In the 200 km the line traverses across England, from Beckenham to the Bristol Channel, it passes through the urban sprawl of London, Reading and Bristol with a combined population of more than nine million people. Next, the line brushes the Gower, then comes within a few hundred metres of Cape Clear Island, the southwesternmost part of Ireland, where I spent two happy months in 1967, before passing just north of the Fastnet Lighthouse. That is the last land we will see before the northern peninsula of Newfoundland, 3100 km away across the broad Atlantic swells. Westward still, it passes through the giant volcanic caldera of Lac Manicouagen in Quebec, Moosonee at the south end of James Bay, then the north end of Last Mountain Lake, SK, the first bird sanctuary in North America. Roughly from there, forest turns to prairie, mostly farmed, until it reaches the Rocky Mountains. It crosses Dunn Peak Provincial Park in BC to reach the Pacific coast at the remote fishing camp, Duncanby Landing, 75 km north of Port Hardy on Vancouver Island, 5000 km from its Newfound-landfall. And across North America, for the first 3000 km, you would see almost nobody: the odd forestry crew, the odd mine, the odd first nations village. If it was night, there would be no light because you would cross not a single highway. And the track that the line follows across the eastern part of Canada is not even the country’s emptiest region.
Now let’s take a line at right angles to the one we have followed westwards from Beckenham; a line exactly one quarter of the way round the planet, that of 90° W. Like all lines of longitude, it passes from the South Pole to the North. From the coast of Antarctica, at 72° S, it crosses 8000 km of the Pacific Ocean, passing orcas and icebergs, then turtles and flying fish, before striking the coast of Central America near the Guatemala/El Salvador border at 14 deg N, thence crossing diagonally across the isthmus, and emerging into the Gulf of Mexico near the Mexican city of Merida, of happy memory. It strikes North America in the Mississippi delta, slices through the Midwest and emerges on the shore of Lake Superior in the Porcupine Mountain Wilderness of Michigan.
On the north shore of Superior our line briefly runs through Minnesota and shortly after that it crosses the Canadian border, cutting the trans-Canada highway at 48° 38’N, the south coast of Hudson Bay at 57° 02’N and the northwest coast of the same bay at 63° 44’N. Just north of the uninhabited Ukkusiksalik National Park, our line crosses the Arctic Circle (66°33’ N), then across Pelly Bay, onward up Prince Regent Inlet and across the small, barren, cliff-girt Prince Leopold Island, where I spent many summer months across forty years. From there it traverses Devon and Ellesmere islands and 890 km of Arctic Ocean before terminating at the North Pole. If we continue on in the same direction, we are now sliding southwards on 90° E.