Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
you want to get picky about it (and of course I do), the State's nickname does not apply to 75 percent
of its land and 99 percent of its people. Certainly, nights are very short over most of Alaska during
the summer. Indeed, nighttime may be more like a prolonged twilight. But midnight sun? Sorry. That
only works north of the Arctic Circle. And there's one more detail that has been conveniently over-
looked. Any locale that experiences midnight sun at one time of the year will also experience noon-
time darkness at another time of year (see Chapter 7). “Land of the Noon-time Darkness?” Put that
on your license plate! Actually, yes, I do get the point of it all. “Land of the Midnight Sun” is about
image and tourism and putting your best foot forward. But as far as truth-in-geography is concerned,
forget about it.
Tropical Paradise
Tropical + paradise. They go together like rocket + science, or banana + split. The genesis of this
verbal union is, of course, The topic of Genesis from the
Bible.
Adam and Eve wore no clothes, so
the Garden of Eden must have been warm. And since the Garden was a garden, it must have had a
fair amount of rain. Warm + rain = tropical. Therefore, Paradise (capital P) was tropical.
Until fairly recent times, lots of people believed the biblical Paradise was real. That meant not only
that the Bible was literally true concerning the Garden of Eden, but that it actually existed and
was awaiting rediscovery. Some medieval world maps even showed an island off East Asia named
Paradise. So when the early Spanish voyagers, thinking they had reached East Asia, encountered lush
Caribbean islands, they truly believed they had found the tropical Paradise. Today, of course, “tropic-
al paradise” has much more to do with tourism than theology. Typically, it appears in ads that encour-
age you to dispose of your disposable income by vacationing in some tropical destination.
It turns out, however, that just about every tropical paradise is a developing country with all of the so-
cial and economic problems that come with that title. Accordingly, many tropical resorts are a kind of
compound that purposefully insulates affluent visitors from local realities. Please understand that this
is not a put-down of those locales and certainly not of the people who live there. The residents tend to
be honest, decent, hard-working, peace-loving people who are proud of where they come from. And
as well they should. But with all due respect, just delete “tropical paradise” from your memory.
The Democratic Republic of . . .
Every country has an official name, and it usually differs from the name by which it is commonly
called. Thus, Ireland is really The Republic of Ireland, and Thailand is really the Kingdom of Thai-
land, and so forth. Some of the “real” names are wonderfully evocative. Examples include The
