In Search of the North Pole
I know I left it here somewhere…
For I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar, Act III, Scene 1
While going through some old papers recently, I came across a letter I wrote to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1988. On November 20 of that year, the following item (edited here for relevance) appeared in a piece by the Chronicle columnist Adair Lara:
Admiral Peary: What’s 105 Miles Among Friends?
Did the famous arctic explorer, Robert E. (Close Enough) Peary, make it to the North Pole on April 6, 1909, or did he just make it into the general neighborhood and call it a day? And if he did not make it to the pole, did he know he didn’t make it? If you know you’re 105 nautical miles from the pole, but don’t plan to work that fact into any subsequent conversations, you don’t jot down your exact position and give that scrap of paper to your wife for safekeeping. His supplies were running low, the warming weather was making the ice dangerous. To go forward would be to risk everything. To go back would be to give up everything. He had no choice. He had to move the pole.
A few days later, the following appeared in the Letters to the Editor column (signature changed to protect the original writer’s identity):
Editor:
The controversy concerning Admiral Peary and his calculation on the North Pole is completely useless. According to my calculations, the poles move a little every year and the direction is as erratic as a hurricane or a spinning top. Where the poles were in 1909 or 1,000,000 B.C. is anyone’s guess. The shape of the Earth changes as the poles move, causing the earthquakes.
George Spelvin
Stockton, California
Here is (an updated version of) the letter I wrote in reply. For some reason, they didn’t see fit to publish it:
Letters to the Editor
The San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission Street
San Francisco, California 94103Editor:
In answer to George Spelvin’s speculations on the whereabouts of the Wandering Poles: According to my five minutes of exhaustive Internet research, at the time of Admiral Peary’s expedition in 1909 the Poles were located somewhere on the upper Dnieper River in western Russia, near what is now the city of Smolensk. They appear to have arrived at their present position between the Oder and the Vistula early in 1939, triggering the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1,000,000 B.C., they are believed to have been situated just west of Peoria, Illinois.
Spelvin is mistaken, however, in his belief that the migration of the Poles is responsible for earthquakes. These are caused by the gradual escape of hot air from the earth’s interior, causing the planet to shrink imperceptibly over time, rather like a beach ball with a slow leak. (This same phenomenon also accounts for the Indian monsoon, the aurora borealis, and most of Donald Trump’s tweets.) Ten million years from now, scientists estimate that the earth will have been reduced to approximately the size of a large grapefruit, by which time the Poles will have migrated to the vicinity of the planet Neptune. This is known as the Coriolis effect.
In other news, textual analysis has now conclusively established that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by the prophet Moses in or about the 14th century BCE; that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Sir Francis Bacon in Sarajevo, Croatia, in 1865; and that the first five books of the Bible are the work of one Martin Berman-Gorvine of suburban Washington, D.C., probably in collaboration with George Soros or some other person or persons unknown. I hope this dispels any lingering confusion that may remain about these matters, and that we will be hearing nothing further about them for some time to come.
Sincerely,
V. O. Reason
Berkeley, California
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“In Search of the North Pole” by Stephen Chernicoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
