nine marathons
Like most people who moved cities for school, for work, or just to get away, I distinguish home and Home—the former being wherever I’m living at that time, while the latter, proper-noun Home, refers to where I’m from. I’m going Home to visit family. I’m moving back Home. Home for the holidays. And so on. I’m young and broke, and move around a lot. This has led to a bad habit of putting Home down as my mailing address for things such as taxes and medical records. A couple of times a year I get that annoyed call from my parents, where they tell me about this thing that just arrived in the mail with my name on it.[fn:1] If it’s something important, I’ll usually ask them to scan it and email it to me. I’ll promise to update my address, but I never do.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about distance. About the overall size of the world, but also the size of that speck on the globe where I live. Small in the grand scheme of things I guess, but also massive.[fn:2] A lot of people who have lived in Texas will joke about how the state is so big that it feels nearly impossible to get out of. As someone who’s only had the privilege of riding in a plane once in my life, there’s a lot of truth to this. Texas is seven hundred- and seventy-three-miles wide. A trip Home is about two hundred and forty miles—only a third of the overall width of the state. One one-thousandth of the distance between Earth and the moon.[fn:3] The universe is so terrifyingly huge that I try not to think too much about any of anything that exists beyond the reaches of our atmosphere. The fact that oceans exist is enough anxiety as it is.[fn:4]
While miles are one way to think about things, time is a truer currency of how far away something is.[fn:5] This is true for me, and for most people I know. We talk about how many minutes or hours away a destination is, barely paying attention to the increase of numbers on the odometer. It’s an weird way of judging distance honestly. While space is fixed, velocity can change. The conclusion then is that time also changes.[fn:6] Yet trying to describe distance in displacement feels wrong, so time is my yardstick. The distance between home and Home is roughly four hours, at an average velocity of about seventy miles per hour. If I were flying rather than driving, I’d have a much shorter distance to travel, though the actual displacement between my beginning and my end would remain fixed. Time bends.[fn:7]
Sometimes I think about what it would be like if some sort of apocalypse happened, like nuclear war or the rapture or anything really that comes so quick people don’t have time to prepare. Cars would line the streets unmoving, gripped to the pavement like massive cicada husks. In such a situation driving would be out of the question. I would have to walk or run most the way Home if I wanted to visit. Journeys that were traversed in minutes before would take hours now.[fn:8] Two hundred and forty miles becomes less of an annoying drive and more of an insurmountable gulf, an abyss stretching between me and my family. This, though the displacement remains unchanged.
According to Google, if walking from home to Home, it would take me about four days, rather than four hours, to get there. But this number is flawed. It doesn’t account for the needs of the body. I am not my car. I need to eat and sleep, and those things take time. Not to mention the question of how many miles I could physically travel in a day before my legs gave out.
I’d consider myself moderately fit, and from my job I know I can stay on my feet for eight hours at the least. Based on statistics from my exercise routine, I’d say I can walk a mile in about fifteen minutes, or four miles per hour. From this input, accounting for the energy expended walking versus standing still, let’s be generous and say I am able to walk one marathon a day.[fn:9] Under these conditions, the journey from home to Home would be a nine-day trek. Two hundred and sixteen hours total, fifty-four times longer than it took driving there. And yet still, no change in displacement. Only a shift from hours to days.
If distance is frightening, time is a monster. It’s no wonder then that the Greeks, thousands of years ago, knew him as one willing to devour his children.
Footnotes
[fn:1] More than a few times, when trying to buy something online, I've accidentally set my mailing and billing addresses as the same, resulting in packages meant for home arriving Home instead. This happened once with a pound of earthworms I had ordered for vermicomposting. I discovered my mistake when my stepdad called to ask why there was a package for me with the words live animals printed along the top. My mom has a garden that the worms were released into. Their home but not their Home. This was some years ago, so maybe there’s been a few new generations of worms in that garden, calling it both home and Home. Knowing nothing of their origins.
[fn:2] Some quick numbers on size. Texas, the second-largest state here in the USA, larger than some other countries, covers an area of 268,597 square miles. The total surface area of our Home planet is roughly 196,900,000 square miles. This is 733 times the size of Texas. Something imperceptibly huge, when superimposed on something imperceptibly huge-er becomes microscopic, a drop in the bucket of space. And we haven't even left the troposphere.
[fn:3] 238,900 miles. It is important to note now, and reiterate later, dimension. Distance as defined as space between A and B is of a single dimension, a segment of a line.
[fn:4] Thalassophobes are ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding the ocean. It's absolutely terrifying. Some further numbers. The deepest part of the ocean is a point on the southern end of the Mariana Trench called the Challenger Deep. It reaches down about 36,000 ft (nearly seven miles). This is as deep as flying planes are high. Deep as it is, the ocean is also large, covering nearly three quarters of the Earth with a surface area of 139,000,000 square miles. Recall again the distance between the Earth and the Moon, but also recall this distance as being expressed only in the first dimension. Even the ocean's surface area, as massive as it is, only provides two-dimensional understanding of a three-dimensional object. The average depth of the ocean is about 2.30 miles. Taking these numbers into consideration and applying the formula for volume (base times depth), we find the ocean occupies roughly 320,000,000 cubic miles of space. Oceanographers and astronomers have a lot in common when you look at it this way. The sea is Earth's answer to the sky.
[fn:5] With regard to the nature of time, not a lot will be said. The science behind time is something incomprehensible to me, and so I won't even begin to pretend to have a grasp on the subject beyond the more general sense. Given how horrible space is, I'm not even sure I want to know more about time than I already do.
[fn:6] For reference, time is calculated by dividing the displacement between A and B (again we find ourselves in the first dimension) by one's velocity.
[fn:7] A more accurate statement would be to say time dilates. But that also covers something else entirely, with implications much more awful.
[fn:8] Take my trip to work for example. Driving, it usually takes me about 20 minutes to get there. If, for some reason, during this apocalypse that destroyed cars I was forced to keep working, it would take me roughly four hours to get there by foot. With regard to time, a drive Home and a walk to work are equidistant.
[fn:9] A marathon is defined as 26.22 miles. The marathon has its origins with the Greek hero Pheidippides, who supposedly ran the distance between Marathon and Athens to announce that the Greeks had emerged victorious in the Battle of Marathon. It may be important to note here as well that, immediately upon completing his mythic-historic run and announcing victory, Pheidippides dropped dead.