Digging A Hole To China

They always said (whoever “they” might have been) that if you dig a hole deep enough, you would come out in China. There was even a car commercial recently that showed a vehicle dropping through the center of the earth and eventually ending up on a street populated by Asians, presumably Chinese.

According to my trusty globe, the auto would have been dropped from Santiago, Chile, if they wanted it to land in downtown Beijing. You just can’t get there from here, but you can from there. (Note to Old Timers: Remember when it was Peking? Remember when it was Peiping?)

Ok, so where do you see daylight when you take your little beach shovel and pail, start digging and don’t stop until you get to The Other Side?

Probably water. But you may be close enough to land, maybe some small island way off southwestern Australia. Start rowing northeast and hope the winds are with you.

When I was really young, China seemed to be the farthest place there was, the other side of the world. As much as I liked reading my grandfather’s atlas, I never really realized where the other side of the planet was. Maybe I should have asked him; he was a very intelligent, if self-educated, person and I’m sure he would have put his pipe aside, taken out his steel measuring stick and figured out, fairly exactly, where we would have come up if we could dig our way through.