You Should Cross the Equator

...at least once.

The equator is a quiet, almost private thing. There's no big orange dotted line. If you aren't paying careful attention, you'll miss it altogether. It's more of an idea than a proper place. But it's worth making the effort to cross it.

Either way will do, although I assume most readers of this letter will be coming at it from the north. Most of the equator lies over open ocean, but it can be reached from land on a couple different continents, so you have options.

The equatorial realm is a strange place for those of us who have spent our lives deep in one hemisphere. The zodiac constellations soar directly overhead now, instead of swinging low in the sky. The sun rises and sets with shocking swiftness. Instead of the lingering Northern twilights, a switch is flipped and night and dawn come suddenly. There are no real weather fronts here, and no changing seasons. Rainy and dry months are sometimes shoved back and forth across the line by weather deeper in the hemispheres, but those motions don't really belong to the equator itself.

It's an uncanny zone at sea, where I am now. I see daily a constant unfolding drama of towering thunderheads and sudden isolated downpours surrounded by shimmering water so blue it hurts to look at. And Polaris, just coming over the horizon now (but impossible to see for all the humidity haze) guides me back to my home hemisphere. Sailors of the past called this place the Doldrums, because of its weak and variable winds - I think it's one of the most fascinating regions of the ocean.

Crossing the line in an airplane does count, absolutely. But there's something about being down on the surface of the earth that dials up the anticipation. Have a GPS handy. Watch the numbers on the latitude coordinate decrease. Get a sense of your own speed, whether by car, ship, or foot. Your phone's accuracy will do - the point of the equator is less to exist in an extremely specific spot and more to give us a way to comprehend the earth we stand on. Watch the numbers click to zero. And then look around. Everything will likely look the same - but like a child in a fairytale, you will be somewhere completely different, and I'm willing to bet that a part of your soul will know.

I suppose some might say it doesn't matter all that much to step across an imaginary line for a while. I find those kinds of people universally annoying. They remind me of the cynical ghost in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce:

“What was Peking like?”

“Nothing to it. Just one darn wall inside another. Just a trap for tourists. I've been pretty well everywhere. Niagara Falls, the Pyramids, Salt Lake City, the Taj Mahal -"

“What was it like?”

“Not worth looking at. Theyre all advertisement stunts. All run by the same people. There's a Combine you know, a World Combine, that just takes an atlas and decides where they'll have a Sight. Doesn't matter what they choose: anything'll do as long as the publicity's properly managed.”

“And you've lived - er - down there - in the Town - for some time?”

“In what they call Hell? Yes. It's a flop too.”

The equator reminds us where we stand. It's hard to get to for most of us, and the journey from here to there demands that attention be paid to distance, and climate, and stars, and the literal lengths to which people can go. The equator requires us to commit to an entirely different hemisphere, if only for a short time. In that new realm we must register new constellations and continents as going concerns. We must take very seriously, perhaps for the first time in our lives, the cultures and habits of people who have been myth and mystery to us until now. To go looking for the equator is to go looking for the whole earth.

True, the equator is an imaginary line. But the whole earth is covered in imaginary lines. Without them we would be lost. The same is true of our lives. Invisible meridians and longitudes laid out by people we'll never know give us a way to navigate our own internal landscapes. Internal and external navigation requires us to use our imaginations, or, like the cynical ghost, become untethered from reality.

The equator is an imaginary line, and it is real. To find it and cross it, and pay attention to the crossing, grants us a better sense of the scale of our whole world. Find it, if you can.