Post 40: The thing about water - Part 3

      The thing about running water is, if moving at a constant speed, it can be used to answer age-old questions about ourselves, the kind we think about regularly.

      Once I was floating with my brother-in-law, Delton, down the White river to the Mississippi, then on down to Arkansas city. We reached the mouth of the White about sundown, and camped on a sand bar. The mosquitoes were beyond the edge of comprehension.(This is a sidelight, not getting to the root of the question here, but it is worth saying, so bear with me.) In pioneer times, nobody could live long here, with Malaria running rampant. The grave yard at Napoleon, Arkansas, a town down there that no longer exists but was there in pioneer days, has lots of tombstones. Few died that were older than 26. Anyway, we set up our tent, sprayed the doorway down good with mosquito repellent, dashed in, zipped it up quick, then we spent the next hour picking them off, one at a time. Then we could sleep. Or, we would have, if it had not been for the buck deer, who resented our presence so much that he spent a good part of the night dashing up and down behind our tent, stomping and snorting. Anyway, now we can get to the scientific work. By morning, I was stopped up, tighter than a drum. I took a good, healthy dose of Castor oil, the most horrible tasting stuff God ever created, but one of the most effective. We then shoved off from the mouth of the White, and by the time we reached the mouth of the Arkansas, I was rushing ashore to the bushes.

      The thing about floating a major river is, you have lots of time to think. By the time we reached Arkansas City, I had finished my calculations: It is 6 miles, 31,680 feet, from one river mouth to the next. The Big Muddy was moving at approx. 6 MPH. The human digestive tract is 23 feet long. Using that raw data, that means Castor oil runs through the human body at a rate of .0007 MPH, something I had always wondered about.

      The thing about huge, standing bodies of water, like the gulf, is, it can be used to answer questions that can make one famous. Or would have, if I had just been born several hundred years earlier. Once I was sitting on the balcony of our condo in Gulf Shores, overlooking the Gulf. I noticed the level balcony railing showed the horizon well above it in the middle, but the horizon dropped below it at the far edges of my vision. Bingo! I was looking at the curvature of the earth. It was round, not flat at all! I got to thinking further. My area of vision must be about two degrees of the full three hundred sixty degrees in a circle. From where the horizon dropped on the left to where it disappeared on the right, following the horizon, the distance must be something like one hundred forty miles. Two degrees covers about 1/180^th of a full circle. 180 x 140 miles gave me an earth circumference of 25,200 miles, a lucky estimate. Oh, if I could have just been born in 1400! But then, I guess, I would have been hard pressed to find a level condo balcony rail in 1400.

      Another sidelight – There is a chunk of Mississippi on the Arkansas side of the river down there, cut off when the river changed course. Not necessarily something for an Arkansan to be proud of, or even admit.