The road ended and I was happy to be there. I shut down and looked around. If a fire did come, I’d be spending the night somewhere on this road. But there was an open-ish clearcut not far away. A hundred acres easy. So, I had a backup plan and that’s all I need to be at ease.
I had a nice lunch. Sitting on the dirt under the shade of a tree. Hawks wheeled overhead in great number. I hadn’t seen a grouse. Maybe the hawks savage ‘em? It seemed like anything hawks eat would be doomed out here.
How far was I from… anywhere? I reformulated that as “how far from anyone” and started doing numbers in my head. I still can’t quite believe how it came out. Y’all are reading this far in the future. If my math was wrong, someone tell me.
I was more or less 15 miles straight out. That’s 15 miles since I’d been on Ridge Highway (which wasn’t a highway of course). Ridge Highway had been empty but I’d seen fresh UTV tracks. I assume there was a UTV somewhere along that road and where there’s a UTV there’s a person (or pack of them). That would be the closest person. The road was the closest route to that hypothetical person. If, by some improbable hypothetical, say if I had a magic carpet or hovercraft, I pressed on from my current location in any direction but the road, it would take more than 15 miles to emerge on any side of the emptiness.
What’s the area of a circle? I remember it as pi times r squared. Take a conservative 15 miles to assume there was a person sitting just at the tangent of my imaginary circle where Ridge Highway met the road I’d just traveled… that’d be 15 squared. So 225. Multiply by pi which, since I wasn’t going to muck about with calculators, I rounded to 3.14. I scratched in the dirt. Carry the one…
706. Not too shabby. A sizable chunk for an old guy on a cheap bike.
If there’s 640 acres in a square mile… brush the dirt clear and start multiplying… 450,000 or so.
I figured I was the sole living homo sapiens within a 706 square mile chunk of planet earth. A little under a half million acres with nothing but me.
I don’t know if that was exact, I’d taken a few turns on the road. Maybe I was less that 15 miles out by air?
700 square miles sure seems unbelievable. Especially since I was only here on a whim.
Maybe there’s unseen people in that nothingness? Some crazy moonshiner reliving the whiskey rebellion? A trophy poacher who’s absolutely badass? Some industrious/paranoid lunatic with the world’s most inconvenient pot grow? Improbable, but who knows?
It seems weird to be that far from the nearest human… but math is math. Is 15 miles simply a bigger space than one usually ponders?
I listened hard; no motors in the distance. No airplanes overhead. I hadn’t seen tracks on the road. Nobody had been here at least since the thunderstorm several days ago swept it clean.
It was deathly quiet. Just the whispering of the winds on the endless reeds and a few trembling aspen leaves here and there. I heard a hawk cry. Nothing else. Even the insects were quiet (possibly reduced by the drought).
I closed my eyes and enjoyed it. Our planet has so much peace. You just need to cup your hands and drink of it.
I pinged my SpotX “Safe in the middle of 700 square miles. Location = XYZ.” Then, because I didn’t want to hear the electronic chirp if it received anything, I turned it off.
I waited a good long time, just sitting in the dust; listening to the sound of forever.
Time passed. Eventually the sun began to approach the horizon. Wistfully, I rode back out. I hopped the same tree with the same result. Later, I spooked a turtle and a little snake… but other than that.. it was all hawks and reeds.
I still can’t get over the scales involved. A silly little dirtbike and a dead end empty road got me to a place that would have taken a week, or maybe two, if I’d tried bushwhacking. I got to see that place and still return to camp with time to cook dinner before dark. What a fine day I’d had!
That night, I slept like a baby.
