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The "Extreme Geographer" Idea Takes Off Except for those folks who had lined up other jobs, most of my 120 colleagues at the Central Planning Office were very saddened – no, make that depressed – about our termination notice in November. I was too, to some extent, though I was trying to focus on the bright side. Most of my CPO colleagues spent the next four months not doing much of anything in the office except occasionally training the people who would be taking over for them. That has to be the saddest task you can ever imagine: training someone to take over your job while knowing that you’re being terminated. But it had to be done.
It was a strange four months for everyone in the office, as most folks were in a mixed state of denial, shock, sadness, apprehension and lethargy. A few lucky folks, mostly the engineers, landed jobs elsewhere in Qatar but the rest of us were preparing to move back home, whether that be India, the U.K., Sri Lanka, the Philippines or, in my case, the U.S.
I was in a slightly better mood than most, though, partly because I didn't have a spouse or family to support. There's little job security in the field of engineering consulting and indeed, that's a major reason why I've never gotten married, because I don't want to worry about supporting someone else. Heck, I have enough to worry about just supporting myself.
I spent a lot of time during those four months, like I say, planning my upcoming road trip around America. I was trying to look forward to something rather than look back on memories and missed opportunities – opportunities like looking for another job in Qatar when I had a chance, instead of being such a loyal employee to the CPO. And so, the day after we got the news about our contract cancellation, I sat down at my desk at CPO and asked myself, “Where in the U.S. do I want to go?” There was suddenly no billable work or pressing deadlines to meet, so with nothing else to do, I opened my GIS (i.e., computer mapping) software and started creating a dot map, putting a dot on each place that I wanted to visit in America during my upcoming planned trip around the U.S.
During the next few days certain themes emerged as I occasionally updated my dot map. I had placed dots on some of my favorite places that I wanted to visit again, like southern Utah and Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. Other dots indicated places I had never been, like Memphis, Tennessee, the largest city in the U.S. that I had never visited (it's ranked #28 in U.S. population. Over the years I've visited cities #1 through 27). And still other dots represented my friends and relatives around America that I wanted to see – and a few that I didn’t especially care to. OK, Aunt Edna, I’m just kidding.
As I started planning my upcoming trip around America, I also put a few dots over places of geographic extremes, like the easternmost point of the United States (in Maine), which I’d visited in 1985, and the westernmost point of the Lower 48 states (in the state of Washington), which I had visited in 1993. I'd always been fascinated with geographic extremes.
“Heck,” I said to myself as I looked at my map – I would’ve said something more colorful but this was the Middle East and swearing is discouraged – “if I’m going to those places, I should also go to the southernmost and northernmost points of the U.S., because I’ve never been there.”
And so I put a dot on Cape Sable, in Everglades National Park on the southern tip of Florida, which is the southernmost point of the contiguous United States. Then I put a dot on the northernmost point of the contiguous U.S., a place called the Northwest Angle in northern Minnesota. The Northwest Angle is about 20 miles north of the 49th parallel, the imaginary line that runs west from Minnesota to the state of Washington and defines the U.S. border with Canada.
Now, some of you might think that Key West, Florida is the southernmost point of the Lower 48 states and not Cape Sable. But Key West is an island, so yes, Cape Sable is the southernmost point of the United States mainland. And because the geography of America was still uncertain in the 1700s, an obscure place called the Northwest Angle in Minnesota, which is surrounded by Canada, is the northernmost point of the Lower 48 states. Few people have been to the Northwest Angle and fewer people have been to Cape Sable because both places are hard to get to, but I wanted to visit both.
Those were the extreme cardinal directions: North, South, East and West. Then I decided to also visit the extreme ordinal directions during my road trip: the Northeast, Southeast, Northwest and Southwesternmost points of the U.S. Using my GIS software and Google Maps, and sitting at my desk in the soon-to-be-defunct Central Planning Office, I calculated the coordinates of these locations and studied the aerial imagery at each point.
I also did some Internet research and realized that, surprisingly, no one seemed to know where these extreme ordinal points were located. For instance, I read several stories online that said San Diego, California was the “southwesternmost point of the United States.” But they were wrong, because according to my calculations, the southwesternmost point of the United States was near Lompoc, California, a bit farther north than San Diego, certainly, but a whole lot farther west.
A few weeks later – by now it was early December – I started calculating the extreme inter-ordinal points of the Lower 48, deciding to visit those places during my trip, as well. That's because, after all, I'm the extreme geographer! These included the north-northwesternmost point, the south-southeasternmost point and the other six inter-ordinals. Altogether then, between the cardinal, ordinal and inter-ordinal points, there were 16 extreme compass points around the U.S. that I wanted to visit during my upcoming road trip. I put them all on a map, here:
I did some more Internet research and realized that no one had ever been to all 16 extreme compass points of the United States (or if someone had, they had never documented it). I decided to become the first. But I also wanted to make it a feasible task given my somewhat- constrained budget and timeframe, so I decided to limit my quest to the contiguous mainland U.S., also known as the Lower 48. My rules for this “Extreme Geography" trip around America, therefore, were simple:
My goal was to become the first person to visit all 16 extreme geographic compass points of the Lower 48 states, literally the 16 corners of America. And since my trip’s theme would be "geographic extremes," I started adding more extreme destinations other than the compass points, including the highest city in the U.S. (Leadville, Colorado), the lowest lake (the Salton Sea in California), the lowest city (Calipatria, California), the longest highway (U.S. Route 20), the coldest city (International Fall, Minnesota), and the driest place (Death Valley).
By February of 2016, I had created a map containing over 100 destinations around the United States that I hoped to visit. I also started creating my new website, which I called www.ExtremeGeographer.com. I was proud of the dot map I had created. Now I just had to connect the dots! I knew that I’d be in Qatar for another few months but I was eager to get back to the U.S. and start my trip.
Above left: In late November I invited my American friend, Tom, over to my apartment to celebrate Thanksgiving. I had cooked a turkey the year before, but this year I settled for turkey sandwiches. Above right: Tom enjoying his Thanksgiving feast: Turkey sandwiches, stuffing, scalloped potatoes and cranberry sauce.
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