75 Days to Opening Day

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 75 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is Blame it on the Rain: How the Weather Has Changed History by Laura Lee. The chapter Lost Siberians is the story of how North America got its people, but the passage is an interesting side note from that wacky decade we know as the ‘80s.

As the ice age gave way to warmer temperatures around 13,500 BC, small bands of humans moved into the extreme northeastern part of Asia. Some of them wandered into a piece of real estate that no longer exists, the land the archaeologists call Central Beringia. This land bridge connected Asia and North America across what is now the Bering Strait.

Even today the gap between Alaska and Siberia is small enough – only 2.5 mi at its closest – that deep freezes sometimes make it possible for people to walk from one side to the other. Of course, what the atmospheric climate makes possible the political climate has generally not permitted, as John Weymouth of San Francisco discovered in 1986. When he walked across the frozen Bering Strait from the United States into the USSR, Weymouth found himself the focus of an international incident. After two weeks of interrogation and negotiations between the U.S. State Department and the Kremlin, the wanderer managed to convince the two governments that he was not a defector or a spy, just a curious guy who thought it would be fun to walk to another continent. He was finally sent back to America in a military helicopter.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.