View from the North40: It's not planes, trains and automobiles

When I was about 15 years old a friend of my family rode his 10-speed bicycle on a 330-mile road trip from Salmon, Idaho, to our home in northwest Montana and then home again — a 660-miles that took about a week each way, averaging something under 50 miles per day. He was 16 years old, and this was in the dark ages before cellphones and internet. He had to use quarters in pay phones and know how to fold paper maps.

I remember admiring that he even conceived of doing such a thing, let alone planning and executing the trip. I also remember being in awe that his parents just let him go on this long-distance trek. Alone.

I’m pretty sure my parents would’ve given me a hard “no” to this kind of proposal (though, to be fair, they knew me so it would’ve been a sound judgment call). I’m also absolutely certain I didn’t have the ambition to see something like this through.

But I’m here to say that our friend’s 660-mile summer bicycle trip is not much of a big deal compared to a tiny fox’s recent 2,700 mile trip across the frozen arctic, which she started just prior to her first birthday.

National Public Radio reported earlier this month that an arctic fox that had been fitted with a tracking collar in Norway in 2017, left on what became an epic trip one day in late March 2018. I suspect she was young and delusional and thought she was “going places” to “make something” of herself.

But 21 days later she found herself 928 miles away in the hinterlands of northern Greenland, no doubt second-guessing the choices she was making in this world.

She wandered out onto the polar ice in a giant loop, probably trying to find the meaning of life, then decided she wanted to be a Canadian. She hot-footed herself west then north into the northern part of Ellesmere Island by July 1, 2018.

Researchers told NPR that the fox’s mean travel distance was 28 miles per day, but she went as much as 96 miles per day while crossing the ice sheet of northern Greenland toward Canada.

In case that didn’t sound impressive enough, you should know that this little arctic fox was less than 12 inches tall and had to hunt for and kill her food every day.

While we’re looking at long-distance travel, UPI reported last week that a message in a bottle traveled the 2,833 mile stretch between Well, Maine, and North Uist, Scotland, to pass along these epic words of a then-13-year-old boy: “Hello, my name is Matt Rhoades. Please write back.”

Hmmm. Even 34-year-old Rhoades admitted that had he known, he “would have written something much more substantial.”

Uninspired message, the bottle just floated and didn’t have to fight for its life or feed itself, so in many ways not as impressive as the other two trips. But if your powers of observation and your rudimentary math skills are keen today, you will have noticed that the note survived 21 years from the time it was chucked into the ocean until it was found. That’s pretty impressive.

Despite the tediously slow delivery method, it was still more successful than Frenchman Franky Zapata and his kerosene-powered hoverboard — kind of like what the movie “Back to the Future” promised us only with a giant backpack of fuel strapped to the rider’s back.

Reuters reported Thursday that in his attempt to fly across the English Channel, Zapata failed to negotiate a refueling stop on a manned boat, at which point he and his jet-hoverboard got dumped in the drink. The hoverboard and backpack fuel tank did not make the transformation into a jet boat so Zapata’s attempt to cross the mighty English Channel ended 10 minutes into the 21-mile trip for technical errors and lack of fuel.

I’m not anti-technology, I am typing this on a computer and sending it to work via the internet, but I do have to say that Zapata has a long way to go to beat a boy on a bike, a fox in the frozen tundra and a stupid message in an unmanned bottle floating mindlessly in the ocean.

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Although, maybe, if the hoverboard is fitted with floaties Zapata could make it to the other side of the channel in a couple years just bobbing along in the open water at [email protected].