Things to Worry About, by Art McCann
Or not really worry, but maybe to think about if you can’t get to sleep some night. That’s how the question came up in the first place. My friend, who apparently often can’t get to sleep, asked me on the beach if I ever considered what would happen if the earth stopped spinning even for just a second. He thought everybody would fly off into space.
I told him I never have considered that. He thought that if it’s true that the earth has been spinning for couple of billion years, isn’t it quite possible that it would stop for just a second and then we’d all be flying off? I then went in the water.
Later that afternoon, while lying in my hammock at home, I thought I might reassure him by suggesting that he put a stake deep in the ground with a bungee cord attached that he could hook to his belt if he felt the spinning start to slacken (for surely it wouldn’t stop all at once, but begin to slow down, then stop, and presumably start up again).
When apprised of this thought, my wife, who is much smarter than I am, told me that actually gravity was holding us onto the ground, and the spinning of the earth was a counter force, and that the opposite would happen if the earth stopped spinning: We would be held more firmly on the ground, maybe even pushed into it. Since I knew the soil here was very sandy and not rock-like, could we then be sucked toward the center of the earth and bump into the people from the other side who suffered the same fate?
I knew I would see my friend on the beach the next day, so during the Yankee game that evening (which I always watch with the sound off to facilitate my thinking) I endeavored to come up with a solution, since obviously the stake in the ground would also be sucked toward the center of the earth.
The next day I apprised my friend of all this reassuring thinking when he told me that he was not worried about it anymore. The earth stopping to spin, he meant, of course. “I mean, what are the odds?”
I had to agree with him.
He was concerned with something else. Asteroids.
“If an asteroid wiped out all the dinosaurs, one could wipe out all of us, couldn’t it?”
I agreed, but to lighten things up a bit I suggested that I’d like something to wipe out all the jellyfish. There are only so many things to talk about when you go to the beach every day. My friend seemed to forget about the asteroid and started in about dinosaurs.
“Probably it was good that the dinosaurs were wiped out. How would you like it if one of them ate you for dinner?”
I countered that not all dinosaurs were carnivorous; some were plant eaters.
“Imagine what our bushes would look like then. You think the deer are a problem.”
As I said, my friend often can’t get to sleep at night, and that’s when he starts thinking about these things. The earth spinning, or not, asteroids, dinosaurs — none of these kept him up last night, however. As I said, when I tried to lighten things up and mentioned the extinction of jellyfish, he quickly interjected, “No, not jellyfish, squirrels.”
Squirrels were the cause of last night’s tossing and turning.
It seems these squirrels — there were quite a few of them — had managed to infiltrate his supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeder. He told me he saw them coming from blocks away on the overhead wires, and he actually observed them pilfering his bird feeder, despite the guarantee he offered to show me that this was impossible.
“How do they know it’s here? Even when it’s empty I notice them hanging around. How can I get rid of them?”
I said I had no idea, and I quickly went into the water.
When I got out my friend had started a conversation with the man in the neighboring beach chair: “Do you have trouble with squirrels?”
This gentleman turned his chair toward my friend. “No, but the voles are driving me crazy. There are these tunnels all over my lawn. I put these radio transmitter stakes in the ground that are guaranteed to repel them and they’re still there!”
I went back in the water and stayed there a long time.
Art McCann lives in Springs.