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Imagine
yourself dipping your canoe paddle into the Cannon River.
The water spirals behind the break the
paddle makes in the water, and you dig in again. You’re
gliding along, watching green herons perch on nearby
branches, and mallards dive for their next meal, when you notice
something. You’re lost.
Okay
you’re not lost, but you’re disoriented. You’re
headed upriver –-and you’re headed south. Has
the
river made some twisted turn? Or
is the
Cannon River just some anomaly with its northern flowing ways, when
most rivers
in this vicinity charge south?
Turns out
that the Cannon did not take a sharp, unnoticed turn to the north. And it is not an anomaly.
If you head upriver on the Cannon, you will
correctly be going south; if you head downriver, you will be going
north. The
Cannon River originates from Shields Lake in Rice County, and meanders
its way
downhill in a northerly direction, dropping approximately five feet per
mile
for approximately 120 miles until it joins the Mississippi River. Because it flows in a northerly direction,
the Cannon River is in good company. Every
continent has north flowing rivers, except for
Antarctica, and
four of the Earth’s largest rivers (the Nile in Africa, the Ob-Irtysh
and the
Lena in Eurasia, and the Mackenzie-Peace in North America), flow north.
But why
do the Cannon River and other rivers flow north? Why
should they fight gravity by struggling to flow “up?”
The answer is that they neither fight
gravity nor flow up. Rivers only flow
one way---down, and that does not necessarily mean south.
The notion of “up” in relation to north and
“down” to south as a compass directions is purely convention, albeit
one
practiced since the Middle Ages. Since
the Earth is suspended in space and relatively sphere-shaped, no one
compass
direction is really more “up” or “down” than any other.
So downriver and upriver can therefore be in
any direction.
The idea of north as up probably stems from the construction of
conventional
maps. In general, maps are made with
the north arrow pointing toward the top, and south toward the bottom. Some brave mapmakers have deviated from the
conventional style. Australian
mapmakers are notorious for rotating their maps 180 degrees, making the
“land
down under” no longer “down” at all. On
these maps, the southernmost tips of Australia, South America, and
Africa no
longer point toward the bottom. Instead,
they point toward the top. On these maps,
with south at the top or “up”, the
Cannon, the Nile, and
other north-flowing rivers would seem to flow "down", and
south-flowing rivers, like the Mississippi, would seem to flow "up".
If you’ve
never seen one of these maps, seek one out. They
are confusing, startling, and surprising. But
perhaps the most surprising thing about
them is that we find
them surprising at all. Do we really
grow up with these strict associations of up with north, and down with
south? These maps have the potential to
reorder the way we think about geography and the world.
Perhaps
it now seems more logical that the
Cannon flows north, or more accurately, drains in a northerly direction. The
important thing to remember is
this: rivers flow in one, and only one
direction –-down. So the Cannon River
flows north not because it wants a challenge, and not to be unique and
different, but for the simple reason that north, for it, is down.
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