Just thought it was a neat little factoid.I was still trying to get my head around the news of the dwarf star and its seven planets when I made an amazing discovery about our own planet.
I suppose “discovery” isn’t quite the right word, since the fact was already out there and I merely stumbled upon it in the course of poking around the internet in search of something else.
That fact is this: The tiny burg of Rudyard, up there on the Hi-Line east of Chester, is the only community in the United States that sits atop a non-oceanic antipode. In other words, if you went straight through the Earth from every other city, town or census-designated place in the United States, you would come out the other side of the globe in salt water.
Only in Rudyard, population roughly 250, does the exactly opposite point of the globe consist of land, and then only by a whisker.
Rudyard’s is antipodal to the Kerguelen Islands, an archipelago consisting of one large land mass and 300 smaller islands and islets. One of those little islands happens to overlap, in projection on the other side of the world, almost perfectly with Rudyard, as you can see on the map above.
A bit of northern Alaska is antipodal to Antarctic lands, and a few uninhabited specks of central Colorado are opposite a couple of islands that, like the Kerguelens, are lost in the vast reaches of the southern Indian Ocean, but Rudyard is the only town in the United States antipodal to terra firma.
I’m sure Rudyard, out there on the high plains, can seem pretty isolated at times, especially in the dead of a long winter, but the Kerguelens, also known as the Desolation Islands, are more than 2,000 miles from the nearest populated place, in Madagascar.
The Kerguelens were named for the Frenchman who discovered them in 1772. The next visitor was the celebrated Captain Cook, who spent a bleak Christmas on the main island in 1776. Cook described it as a “cold blustering wet country (with) the melancholy croaking of innumerable penguins,” and it was he who called it the “Island of Desolation.”
I found it powerfully consoling, somehow, to have discovered this information last week. I was coming off the flu, for one thing, and my brain had been unwilling to latch onto anything at all for five or six days. My interest in Rudyard seemed to be a sign that my brain was on the mend.
I also cherished it because none of my desultory internet research turned up a single instance of anyone denying that Rudyard was antipodal to land. In short, probably because of the peaceful obscurity of both Rudyard and the Kerguelen Islands, this appeared to be one of those rare facts for which there were no alternatives, in the very modern sense of that word.
More:
http://lastbestnews.com/site/2017/02/prairie-lights-some-consoling-news-from-inner-space/
