Why do maps attract the finger? Who has not run a finger across an atlas or globe and imagined traveling to the end of this highway or that river? Sailing to every island in a chain or climbing every mountain in a range? Several years ago I picked up a globe, ran my finger around the Equator and decided to follow it around the world. Which had the. I had never thought of the Equator as a holiday paradise, but the more I considered it, the more there was to recommend it.
In the last decade many countries in the Middle East and the tropical world have become inhospitable to Americans; yet in most equatorial countries Americans are popular and terrorism is unknown. Except in Kenya, I hardly saw another traveler, I almost never slept in a hotel more than three stories high, and everywhere I met people who still considered a foreign visitor a curiosity or a treat. Although you cannot see it, you can sense its presence, and feel its effects.
It divides the world into climatic and vegetative mirror images. On the Equator at sea level, gravity is weakest, barometric pressure is lowest and the earth spins fastest.
To its north, winds circulate clockwise around zones of high pressure; to its south, counterclockwise. Where it crosses oceans, you find the belt of lazy winds and dull seas known as the doldrums. Placid seas spin unpredictable hurricanes into the hemispheres. The powerful equatorial countercurrent forces the captains of even supertankers to adjust their steering and stirs up a feast of plankton that attracts whales, and their killers.
Where the Equator crosses land, predictable temperature and rainfall nurture life in sensational variety. On land and sea, it is noted for a consistent absence of twilight and daybreak. Nowhere else do you have less time to adjust between day and night. Nowhere is the sun so high in the sky at midday for so many days of the year.
