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Jarrett is a 26-year-old computer programmer who lives in Northampton, Mass.
What he shares with thousands
--perhaps millions--of other people is a touch of curiosity about the world and a love of wandering to find new places.
What sets him apart from the rest of us is that he conceived something quite exciting a few years back--something the rest of us can do to satisfy the urge to go out into woods and field, mountain and swamp and make a small contribution to learning more about the world we live in.
Alex Jarrett founded The Degree Confluence Project. There is nothing quite like it. Through the wonders of the Internet and cheap little global positioning system receivers, Jarrett has made it possible for ordinary duffs like me to do all of the above and feel like mighty adventurers while doing it. Oh yes, and a GPS gizmo isn't absolutely essential. An accurate and detailed map will do, might even be more challenging.
Here's how it works: The Earth is covered by imaginary lines running horizontally and vertically that enable us to pinpoint locations quite accurately. The 180 horizontal lines are called latitude; the 360 vertical lines are called longitude. The spots where those lines intersect can be called several things. Jarrett called them degree confluences.
So much for kindergarten
geography, but I had to get that much out of the way.
In 1995, Jarrett, who certainly qualifies as a curious guy, bought a handheld GPS receiver.
He had always liked to roam around the woods and hills. Now he began taking his GPS along
on walks.
"I lived about 10 miles from 43 degrees north and 72 degrees west, so I thought to myself, 'What would be out there?'"
He wondered what the place would look like where those two lines on the map actually converge on the ground.
"It turned out to be just a spot in the woods," he said, "but the journey of getting there and seeing all the zeroes on the GPS was worth it."
And he wondered if anyone else with a GPS was finding these map intersections, these degree confluences. And he began to think about it and wonder just what all those places looked like it and whether those people got the same kick out of it that he did.
Being a programmer, he designed a Web site just to see if anyone else might be interested in the quest to find, photograph and describe these planetary pinpoints.
He called it The Degree Confluence Project. Nothing much happened for awhile. And then, Jarrett recalls, some guy in Maryland went onto his Web site to say he'd visited a spot in the Old Line State. With that posting on the site, other people began to take notice.
Today, Alex Jarrett's personal venture has turned into something that has fired the imaginations of people worldwide, with more than 1,000 individuals visiting his Web site each day.
To date, 1,353 primary confluences have been visited, pictured and described, in addition to 103 secondary points and 91 unsuccessful attempts to reach intersections. More than 1,680 people from 70 countries around the world have gone out into the world around them in an effort
to locate these select spots representing lines on a map.
Their personal stories of what they did and how they did it, together with their pictures, are the heart and soul of Jarrett's remarkable effort.
"People sort of went crazy for it in Germany," he said, "and all the confluences had been visited in about four months."
The United States is, of course, much larger. Even so, Jarrett believes all the primary intersections in the Lower 48 states will have been visited in about another year's time.
When I first found his Web site--www.confluence.org--I immediately went down the list of countries, clicked on "United States," then on "Virginia."
Excited as I was to think there might be someplace easy to go where I could rack up a contribution to the project, I was soon deflated to discover that all the easier ones have been done. Of course. Visitors to the site quickly discover that Virginia's 10 confluences have all been visited. The same holds true for nearly all the sites in our surrounding states.
"Have they all been done?" I asked Jarrett.
Oh, no, he assured me. Nearly all the ones near heavily populated Eastern and West Coast states have been done, but there are tons of unvisited confluences in more remote places.
Click on the map of Montana, for example, and you'll find many "virgin" confluences. Going farther afield, explore our neighbors Canada and Mexico and you'll find good hunting galore!
If only I had known about this when I'd gone to Big Bend National Park or to British Columbia!
A warning to the curious: This Web site can be truly addictive! Reading accounts of unsuccessful attempts can be as exciting as the ones by adventurers who got there. One man tells of trying to reach a confluence on Vancouver Island; another tells about trying to reach a place on an Arizona ranch and not making it. Yet another tells of risking his life in a sea kayak in Washington state and being lucky to make it back.
The site is full of stories like these. And if the writing in a few accounts falls short of professional, the stories themselves make up for it.
Take the confluence nearest
to Fredericksburg, at 38 degrees north, 78 degrees west. It's located in a woods in Louisa County and the man who went there had to deal with ticks, chiggers and a skeptical landowner.
Not only is the geography often against the explorer, the owners may be, too. In South Carolina, for example, Jarrett said someone made several attempts to reach a confluence located on a military base (Fort Jackson?). Turned away twice, the determined seeker eventually got permission and a military escort to the cherished spot.
Jarrett himself followed up his initial confluence visit with quite a few others, located in New England and the upper Midwest--15 in all.
When the project's popularity took off, Jarrett had to set some basic rules to keep it orderly and maintain veracity for the claims of successful visits. All that information is on the site.
The project has received considerable publicity, and Jarrett notes that reporters who have called him often end up getting the itch to go confluence-hunting themselves.
Undaunted by others' success, said Jarrett, many people are revisiting sites already logged and photographed. "As more people find out about it, there will be more travelers who will make expeditions to find the more remote places."
In an age when it is tough to do something exciting and original in the field of exploration, an unassuming computer programmer from Massachusetts has managed to do just that.
Anyone ready to go confluence hunting?
For those who missed it in the story: www.confluence.org.PAUL SULLIVAN lives in Spotsylvania County. Write him in care
of The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401; send e-mail to him at pbsullivan@compuserve.com; or fax him at 898-3722.
