Snow: mostly melted. Temperatures: in the fifties (F); sixties tomorrow. I take Abel and Daniel strolling. Daniel jumps in all the puddles. He soaks the insides of his boots. I don’t know what he’ll wear if we go out again very soon.
Abel, in the stroller, leans forward, his head as near to the ground as he can get it, as if he were peering into tidal pools.
I halt to check if he’s all right; Daniel races ahead.
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Fun fact I just learned: Canada’s lowest latitude passes through South Bend just a few blocks north of Toad Hall.
(Toad Hall is our house.)
I could pinpoint the location, stroll there, and hop back and forth over the line. “Now I’m south of all of Canada. Now I’m north of a little of Canada.”
I suppose the urge is due to having grown up near the equator.
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I could do this with the nearby drainage divide, too. “Now I’m daining into the Great Lakes. Now I’m draining into the Gulf of Mexico, I mean the Gulf of America.”
It seems a less arbitrary line since it has a basis in physical rather than political reality – until I remember that the Great Lakes drain into the St. Lawrence River and thence into the Atlantic, which
encompasses the Gulf of Mexico (I mean, America). So that, ultimately, the distinction between these drainage basins is artificial.
Of course there’s a physical difference between draining one way and draining the other, but if you mark all such differences you end up with insignificant, postage stamp-sized drainage basins.
Artifice – human purposiveness – seems inescapable if much geography is to be done at all.
I remember checking out geography Ph.D. programs when I was very young. There was the respectable but daunting meteorology specialization; all else seemed postmodern free-for-all. A bitter disappointment to someone who’d vaguely entertained the thought that his vocation might consist of memorizing picturesque but unimpeachable facts, e.g. that Czechoslovakia’s capital is Prague.
