The Largest Rock I Ever Saw

Outside my dining-room window is the sheer face of a steep hill, maybe three stories high, with an exposed face. I look at it often and think, “I am sitting on part of this rock right now; I am on the outside of a planet.”

You see, I could not say this on Jupiter, as it has no surface; at least, not one worth talking about. It’s a gas giant (no smart remarks, guys) and when you crash into it, you are diving from no atmosphere into a fluffy fog, then into something resembling rain, then a little thicker. Maybe the interior is something akin to Jell-O that never quite set. It’s not like Earth, where it hurts when you fall off the roof.

Seems to me I wrote earlier about digging a hole and coming out in China. Well, if you go to Wikipedia and enter “Antipodes,” you will see that only in Argentina and Chile can you do that. Us’n? The best we here on the Coast that is East and north of the Confederacy is more or less near the Kerguelen Islands.

Never been there? Well, dig a big hole, stick your head out of it and look around. Tasmania is to the east, India is to the north and Antarctica is not that far to the south. To the west is the southern tip of Argentina and from *there* you can dig a hole to China.

We are, as I mentioned above, on this big hunk of rock that is racing along on its orbit around the sun. There’s another big rock which will skim by us closely rather soon and even closer after that. Then maybe Jesus comes again.