Poems by Bryanna Plog

Antipodes

by Bryanna Plog

From Canary Fall 2022

Bryanna lives in the Cascade Mountains, where the waters from glaciers and snowmelt travel east into the Columbia River before they journey west to the Pacific Ocean. Her home is along the shore of Lake Chelan, the "deep water" to Salish-speaking people for generations.

I first remember reading the word “antipode” as I sat in a train click-clacking through the frozen plains of central Montana. Back then, a coach ticket on Amtrak’s Empire Builder came with an in-seat magazine that included bits of information about each town that the train stopped in. And there it was: "Shelby, Montana is one of only three locations in the U.S. which have antipode (land directly opposite them on the other side of the planet). Traveling from Shelby through the center of the earth, one would arrive in the Kerguelen Islands, a scientific outpost."

Weathered barns and beaten roads passed by my train window as we picked up speed to venture further east into the vast grasslands of Montana. Sitting there in my seat, watching fields of shorn hay sticking up among puddles that had become solid in the frigid December air, I thought about the other side of the world.

We sometimes say “the other side of the world” as some sort of vague dismissal—people, lands, and waters so distant from us that they don’t deserve any distinguishing feature. They are simply opposite. Out of sight. But for a few moments as my train sped up and left Shelby, Montana, there was not simply an unnamed stretch of ocean on the other side of the world from me, but mountains, and outposts of people.

As is well known, it’s not likely that if you start digging a hole in your childhood sandbox you’ll end up in China. For me, growing up north of Seattle, if I survived the superheated mantle and core of our planet, I would have ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, not quite halfway between southern Africa and Australia. With 70% of our planet covered by oceans, you have to choose carefully if you want to tunnel through the planet and end up on land on the other side.

There are cities and forests and plains with antipodes that correspond with other lands, of course. Whangarei, New Zealand, meet Tangier, Morocco. Hong Kong: La Quiaca, Argentina. Lima, Peru and Pursat, Cambodia. Tahiti and northern Sudan. The central Andes of Colombia and southern Sumatra, Indonesia. One of the most intriguing pairings is that Taiwan, formally known as the island of Formosa, is antipode with the province of Formosa in Argentina. Both words relate to the Latin roots of “beautiful” in Portuguese and Spanish respectively.

What if the other side of the world was not the foil of the hero of a Shakespearean tragedy, but more like two characters in a romantic comedy who are inexplicably linked? Opposites can attract. Two opposites can make something whole. If our world really is a sphere hurdling through space, we’ve all got an antipode we rely on on the other side of the world. The idea of “polar opposites,” emerged in the early 1800’s when we realized there were opposite yet similar frozen worlds at either end of our round planet.

If you are one of the billions of people whose antipode is in the ocean, does that not invite you to take a deeper look at that part of our planet, where basins and mountain ranges are as full of incredible life as our terrestrial neighbors? That random latitude and longitude is not just the middle of nowhere. It’s your antipode—your match. (And if you want to end up in China, start digging that hole in central Chile or northwestern Argentina.)

The Hawaiian Islands are your best bet to find land opposite of the United States: their antipodes are the dusty deserts of northern of Botswana with the western coast of the Big Island lining up with the edge of the lush Okavango Delta. Dig down through the permafrost of the northern edge of Alaska and you’ll be somewhere along the Princess Ragnhild Coast of Antarctica. Besides western Montana, the only other place in the contiguous United States with land antipodes are parts of southeastern Colorado which correspond with two other islands in the Indian Ocean, Saint Paul and Amsterdam.

Saint Paul, Amsterdam, and the other Kerguelen Islands are all sub-Antarctic islands, where ships pass but no humans originally called home. They are now administered by France. I learn that over time, whalers, settlers, and scientists in the Kerguelen Islands have brought the modern world to what are now remote outposts. The islands are populated with invasive species, from rats to rabbits to cats. The warming climate is melting its glaciers. Montana and the Kerguelen Islands have that in common.

December in the Kerguelen Islands is the end of winter, with the sounds of squawking from king penguins and gulls filling the air and green grass growing below rugged hills. I imagined a stiff, biting wind in the Kerguelen Islands not unlike the gusts swirling outside my train window in a Montana winter. There would be mountains jutting up from flat horizons in the Kerguelen Islands just like in Shelby—in one place the never-ending flatness of the Great Plains, the other the Indian Ocean stretching out as far as the eye could see.

Antipodes are not simply opposites. Translated from the Greek, anti-pode means “men that have their feet against our feet” or “with feet opposite ours.”

There is a relationship with the other side of the world.