A Speculation: To Walk around the World

In the second page (technically, p. 6) of Marion Zimmer Bradley's [1]
<Hunters of the Red Moon> (DAW, 1973), we read:

<i>... Why the hell did I ever get this notion, anyway? Sailing
around the world in a small boat - it's not as if I'd be the first.
Or even the fastest.</i>
It seemed a good idea at the time, that's all.
So what if he wasn't the first? These days, everything worth
doing, in the adventure line, had already been done. Climbing
Everest. Sailing around the Horn alone. Reaching the North Pole.
Everything except going to the moon, and that took a kind of
education and sponsorship he never could manage.
<i>I envy the first guy to hike around it on foot. Now *there's*
an adventure for some lucky ***, someday ... </i>

So. I'm not at all sure I'm going to read any more pages of this
book (it sounds like the source for an Elizabeth Moon book I've
already read, so I *know* I don't like the setup), but this notion
captured my imagination. Walking around the Moon? Yeah, I suppose.
But what if "it" were not the Moon but, say, the Earth?

There is nothing more on-topic in this post except the fact that
if there's a story like this I want to read it. But anyway, though
I know perfectly well I'll never *do* this, I find myself wondering
what it would take to walk around the Earth.

First of all, note please that I don't mean just walking across
North America, catching a boat to Eurasia, and then walking across
that. This fails on two counts: some of the time you're not on foot,
and you're nowhere near a great circle distance. Indeed you *can't*
do a great circle distance on foot mostly east-west, or at least
it's not the sensible way to go (for some value of "sensible");
something like 80%+ of the equatorial trip, for example, is water.

So two elementary ground rules:

1) You have to go via the North and South Poles;

2) You can't, in honour of our POV character above, be one of
these wimpy modern adventurers who have huge support staffs
making the trip more or less with them. You want it, you
carry it or make it; or maybe I'll let you cache it along the
way.

In that case, there are several major considerations:

A: Route.

Part of the route is perfectly obvious. You go from the North
Pole to the northern coast of Canada someplace and head via
Panama (I assume, without checking, that *somewhere* there's a
bridge across the canal) to the southern tip of Chile or Argentina.
From there, near as I can tell, the ocean bottom between you and the
Antarctic ice is not riddled with any *major* trenches, so you
have a sort of clear shot to the South Pole.

But then the problems become obvious. Do you stop halfway?
Or do you make whatever you used to walk from Tierra del Fuego
to Antarctic Peninsula sufficiently modular that you can also
walk back north to India or Malaya? (And if so, which? I have
the sense that at *this* time Malaya's the better choice, basically
because of the scary places north of India, but I'm far from sure.
I also note that to reach India you can follow ridges the whole way,
which has to be good from the pressure point of view, while for
Malaya you have Sumatra smack dab in the way. And are ridges too
volcanic to walk safely?) I don't actually *know*, but I'm guessing
ocean bottom temperatures at 80 degrees South are not the same as
at the Equator...

Which brings us to

B: Equipment.

OK, obviously, you need clothes that are easy to wash in cold
running water and that will suit you both for an Arctic winter
and for deserts (well, you can minimise deserts in the Western
hemisphere by adding miles, but I doubt you can evade them so
easily in the Eastern, and anyway I don't see a *completely*
desert-free route through North America that's also even slightly
sane...).

Shoes will probably be a recurring problem.

You'll need climbing equipment suitable to ice, oceanic ridges,
and probably mountains on land too. Three sets? Two? One?

Food for the underwater segments is hard if you do only half
the trip, but *majorly* hard if you do all of it. This might
require so many caches I'd consider it cheating, and then there's
the issue of how you get the food *into* your pressure suit.
On land, food caches seem likely to be broken into, and there
are likely to be parts of the trip where stores are few and far
between.

So anyway, the pressure suit is *the* big challenge. It may have
to be adaptable to a variety of temperatures, and it certainly has
to be cold-OK; it also has to handle varied pressures. (Even if
you do follow ridges the whole way, surely there are valleys crossing
'em somewhere; and what if you fall?) It has to be suitable for
at least some days, for the halfway trip; probably months, for
the full circle. In the ideal world you could wear it also on
the ground in Antarctica and kill two birds with one stone; frankly,
if you can't, I don't see how you can do without at least three
caches. Oh, and you have to be able to sleep in it, I think.

Of course, sufficiently advanced technology is another option, or
such equivalents as we see in, say, <Stardance>. Or extra-special
psychic powers (this goes way beyond what, e.g., Bradley's psychics
are capable of). So if anyone wants to make an on-topic *reply*,
this is the obvious hook.

C: Timing.

This would have required multiple decisions in the past, but global
warming has helpfully arranged that if you make your trip soon enough,
you *have* to start in winter. Come to think of it, does the ice go
all the way to the Canadian shore even in winter any more?

Do you want to hurry and get to Antarctica within a year for the
Antarctic summer, or is it better to take eighteen months and
have the Antarctic winter to deal with? I assume the trade-offs
are basically temperature and perhaps weather vs. nice hard ice.

If you make the full circle trip, of course you also have to end
it in winter.


Well, I've been thinking about this for less than an hour; there's
got to be stuff I'm missing. (Weaponry, I suppose, both to deal
with nasty places and to hunt underwater if you get so lucky?
Legal issues? Somebody's already done it in real life, or at
least as a story?) So hey! have at it!

Joe Bernstein

[1] Bradley credits her brother, Paul Edwin Zimmer, with inter
alia having "provided continuity for all the fighting scenes".
Some references go further and consider him an uncredited
collaborator. In any event, the sequel, <The Survivors> (DAW,
1979) was originally published as a collaboration.

--
Joe Bernstein, writer joe@xxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
.