My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Zartmann, told the class one day that if you started digging, and dug far enough, you could dig all the way to China.
That’s all I needed to hear. I zipped home after school and went straight to the garage, looking for the shovel. I found a good solid spade and headed for the garden. Moop had already picked the corn, so I dug out the last few corn stalks, then just kept digging. China here I come.
After digging the rest of that afternoon and most of the weekend, I had made excellent progress. I had reached a depth of about 12 feet.
But a few problems had arisen. First, extracting the dirt was becoming increasingly difficult. I had to dig dirt steps leading down into the hole so that I’d have a way to get the new dirt out. Second, my hands were getting blistered. I was wearing gloves, but they didn’t help that much. And third, the dirt was getting harder and harder as I dug deeper. It really wasn’t dirt anymore; it was hard-packed clay.
The biggest problem was yet to come. Moop pointed out that China was about 8,000 miles away via the center of the Earth. I’d dug 12 feet down in three days. She recommended that I do the math and find out how long it would take.
I borrowed the Geezer’s adding machine, which was as close as you could get to a calculator back then. Let’s see… 12 feet in three days meant 4 feet per day. There were 5,280 feet per mile, so that’s…. click click click… 1,320 days per mile. And there were 8,000 miles, so that’s… click click click… 10,560,000 days. So that means it would take… 28,900 years.
“It might also get a little hot when you start getting close to the center of the Earth,” said Moop when I showed her the figures. “The core is more than 10,000 degrees.”
Hmmm. There are always naysayers with every project, I thought. I kept at it for a couple more weeks. I wanted to at least get far enough down that I could feel how hot the center of the Earth was. I can’t remember exactly why I finally gave up, but I bet it had something to do with either pinball, fishing, or Susie Q’s.
