136: You Are Here
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Amy McInnis flies people to the North Pole. Taurus, they pay thousands of dollars for the privilege. It's a six hour flight in a prop jet. And for most of that time, if you look at the window, all you see is ice. When you get to the pole, it looks exactly like all the other ice you've been staring at for hours. So the tourists climb out of the plane, they're only given half an hour at the pole. And what do most of them do with the time? Take pictures. Most of them have brought these little global positioning devices, GPS's. And they spend their time looking at the devices, which tell them that, yes, this is, in fact, the North Pole. Here's Amy McInnis. Getting out of the plane and looking around, there'd be nothing to tell you that you're at the North Pole. They can usually verify it by just powering up the GPS. You know, I realize actually, as we talk, I have no picture in my head of what would be at the North Pole, except what you would see in like a kid's cartoon, which is like a barber pole sticking out of the ground. But there's no such a thing, right? No, and it seems ridiculous, and I laugh, but I've had passengers ask, you know, where's the barber pole sticking? Oh, really? Yeah. But we usually, with the groups, we take up some kind of a fake barber pole and stick it in the ice somewhere, just for pictures' sake, you know? Oh, my. Yeah. [Laughter] [Music] There are the people who always want to know where they are in the world. They move through the world, checking their position, and this is the kind of travel that we all do sometimes. That's all about that moment of you are here. You know, you check where you are, you check your position on the map, you take a snapshot, you move on. The North Pole is just an extreme example, because of course, there's nothing there, no one to meet. You're only there for half an hour. It costs $30,000 per person, and until recently, a regular civilian would have no way to confirm that they were at the North Pole, since normal compasses, like the one on the airplane that Amy McGinnis flies, because we're so close to the magnetic North Pole, that it basically tips in the jar it's sitting in and is unreliable, it'll be, you know, 60 degrees off the proper heading. It tips as if to say, "Oh, forget it." Yeah, exactly. [Music] And then there's this sort of person who kind of enjoys the moment when the compass stops working, when there's no way to tell exactly where you are, and no global positioning system to help you figure it out.
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