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Many animals have such an implicit understanding of the differences between local and global landmarks that these can be shown to play different roles in their lives. Small, local landmarks are quickly disregarded when they show signs of being unreliable. Cues derived from large, distant landmarks are clung to with much more tenacity, and some studies show that animals are more reluctant to abandon representations of space based on the orientation of such masses. Determination may move mountains, but it doesn’t happen very often.
Some of the most exalted of human navigators have learned to conquer vast tracts of what, to the untrained eye, can appear as the archetypal example of flat, featureless territory—the open sea. Long before there were global positioning satellites, maps, or even compasses, human beings found ways to complete long voyages over open water employing the most subtle of cues, including landmarks.
Puluwatese marine sailors of the South Pacific routinely embarked on voyages of up to 650 kilometers in large, wind-driven outrigger canoes, navigating completely without instruments. In many cases, these expeditions were conducted for the simplest of reasons— to obtain a new stash of tobacco, or even for the men to escape the pressures of village life for a few days by fishing on a remote island.
Among the Puluwatese, the navigators were a revered class. They underwent rigorous secret training and a long apprenticeship under a master navigator before being allowed to guide a crew on the high seas. Much of this training involved painstaking memorization of the sequence of appearances and disappearances of stars along the horizon as an evening’s sail progressed. Although the path that stars take across the heavens changes from season to season, where they appear and disappear is more stable.
Most voyages consisted of a series of segments connecting islands that were close enough to be visible from one another, but, given the distances involved, target and landmark islands could be tiny brown dots in a vast blue ocean. Puluwatese navigators learned clever strategies that increased the visibility of these distant objects. Seabirds often aggregate near particular islands, and so their appearance in the sky foretells the sighting of a landmass. By attuning themselves to the identity and habits of such birds, Puluwatese navigators learned to see over the horizon, into the future. Landmasses, even small ones, affect patterns of cloud formation. As well, land and water have different effects on the appearance of the sky that overarches them. Skilled navigators learned to tune keen vision to these subtle signs so that they not only could detect an island before its silhouette crossed the threshold of visibility but could often identify it based on the reflections cast by its trees, bushes, and lagoons on the sky above.
Puluwatese navigators also devised some subtle conceptual tools that could help fill in the blanks left by the organization of the human mind. They tracked their progress at sea using a method called etak, which involves lining up a succession of stars near the horizon with the positions of visible landmarks. The navigators memorized these star positions during their training, and their later observations allowed them to estimate their position in the sea. Interestingly, though Puluwatese navigators learned to master complicated lists of star-landmark combinations that could help them to gauge their progress, they apparently had no real understanding of the geometry of space that made these feats possible. Try as he might, Thomas Gladwin, an anthropologist who studied the Puluwatese people, could not make them see the geometric relationship between vessel, island, and star as it might appear to an overhead observer.8 Gladwin reports, somewhat mysteriously, that the Puluwatese were able to line up star positions with the locations of landmarks even when the landmarks were not visible. Although how is not clear to me from his account, my surmise is that they were somehow able to bootstrap the estimated location of an etak landmark from the sum of all the information and intuition that they were able to bring to bear on their current location, perhaps also using a little intuition and blind luck.
The navigational feats of the Puluwatese are almost beyond the imagination of any but the most experienced Western sailors. It is hard to comprehend the skill of a navigator who can be blown off a capsized canoe in an ocean gale in the middle of the night and not only regain his purchase on board the vessel but also manage to compute his location and bring his crew safely home. Such sensational feats of navigation, like those of the Inuit, were mostly based on a keen observational eye and arduous practice in the patterns of star movement and the locations of visual landmarks. Such knowledge was probably so deeply ingrained through training as to have become completely automatic, probably seeming almost mystical to the Western anthropologists who studied them. There is at least a hint of mystic reverie in the description given by David Lewis of the navigational prowess of one of his main informants, the indomitable Tevake:
It was for eight solid hours that Tevake stood on the fore-deck … gazing intently at the sea and only moving to gesture from time to time to guide the helmsman. Then around 14.00 something more substantial than mist loomed up through the murk fine on the port bow perhaps two miles off. “Lomlom,” said Tevake, with satisfaction. Very soon afterwards Fenualoa also became visible to starboard and it was apparent that Tevake had made a perfect landfall on the middle of the half-mile-wide Forest Passage between the two, after covering an estimated 45 to 48 miles since his last glimpse of the sky.9
Reading this passage and wondering about the abilities of human beings so acutely tuned to their environment as to appear to use methods beyond the grasp of mere mortals reminds me of a conversation I once had, somewhere near the end of a long bottle of rum on an idle summer day, with a retired Nova Scotia fisherman. He told me that one of the most important skills for a fisherman was to be able to return to the same spot in the ocean from one day to the next. One didn’t necessarily want to employ marker buoys, as these would also be visible to competing fisherman, so it was better if one was able to use fixes on distant shoreline landmarks to estimate position. I asked him whether he could also return to a good fishing position when visibility was poor and shoreline landmarks were invisible, and he assured me that he could do so. When I asked him what the secret was, he fixed me with a surprised stare as if he had suddenly discovered that he was dealing with a simpleton.
“You just know when you’ve gone too far.” All too often, I wish this were true.
In the scorching heart of Australia, water is scarce, transient, and unreliable. Anyone hoping to survive in such an environment needs to know where to look for the precious stuff. Among the earthly environments where survival depends on mastery of physical space, the Australian Outback is one of the most formidable examples. We might expect that human cultures that have adapted successfully to such a bleak setting would, like Puluwatese or Inuit navigators, have mastered some special abilities to keep track of their locations. In one intriguing study, an Australian perceptual psychologist assigned Aboriginal schoolchildren living in the great Western Desert in Australia and young Australians of European heritage who had grown up in the same area a task that required them to memorize the locations of an array of natural or artificial objects.10 Not only did Aboriginal children show superior recall but their approach to the problem was different from that observed in the European children. Aboriginals stared quietly at the array of objects before being asked to reconstruct their positions. The other group fidgeted, verbalized, and audibly ruminated on the task during the learning phase and often rushed to identify the locations of the several items that they had managed to memorize as soon as the task began. There is no reason to think that there might have been biological differences between the children of different backgrounds in this study. It is much more likely that the native Aboriginal children, having been raised in a culture that placed high value on knowing the places of things and their spatial relationships as a matter of survival, would find the solutions required of them in these psychological experiments to be completely natural.
In his remarkable book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin proposes that there is a vita
l link between the stories that form the oral tradition of the Aboriginals and the size, shape, and appearance of their physical landscapes.11 This link is thought by Aboriginals to hold the key to understanding Creation. Their creation stories suggest that the landscape was literally sung into existence during the first days, called the Dreamtime, and that the human occupants of the land, in their role as shepherds of all that has been created, are required to continue to participate in this song in order to help keep the earth’s spirit alive. The shapes of the sounds in the songlines bear a tight relationship to the physical features of the landscape. Hilly land connects with undulating tunes. Flat areas connect with long, legato phrasing. Because of this, not only do the songlines play a role in the spiritual life of the traditional Aboriginal but they serve as navigational aids as well. Just as the Inuit embed a detailed verbal map of the physical landscape in their stories, the Aboriginal songlines, by connecting different parts of the landscape into a creation narrative, help people to find their way from one sacred site to another.
Members of societies with ancient origins who depend heavily on being able to find their way over long distances have developed sensitivities that have allowed them to compensate for lacking some of the tools possessed by other animals. Insects, birds, mice, and rats may be able to learn directly the size, shape, and geometry of the places where they spend their time, but we humans are more likely to learn and memorize names, concepts, connections, and stories. One key to accurate navigation in human beings is the development of an acute sense of observation, so that even subtle signs of direction and distance can be used to help one find one’s place. But in addition to skills of observation, early human societies developed rich oral traditions in which their knowledge of the land was embedded in stories involving creation, spirituality, and the life histories of their deities. At the very least, these oral traditions have helped such societies to come to terms with the enormous memory load required to maintain a detailed map of one’s local environment based on landmarks.
Everyone has a warehouse of memories filled with landmarks that evoke powerful feelings and detailed stories from our pasts. When driving to Toronto, my first glimpse of the CN Tower never fails to remind me of the wasted days spent working at that insurance company as a student, but it also somehow becomes wrapped up with many other memories of adventures, escapades, and close calls in the city I called home as a child and teenager. Similarly, on my first trip to New York City, the first glimpses of major landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building were what brought me to full frontal contact with that storied city. When I saw the statue, I knew where I was. When we travel to new places, we gravitate first to those epic places, the grand sights that appear on the first postcards sent home—the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall, and the Bridge of Sighs. We seek these places out less because they serve as convenient navigational beacons (though, significantly, they often do) and more because standing near such monuments helps to stamp our presence in these new locations into memory. We may laugh at the excited tourists having their pictures taken in front of the Disney Castle in Orlando, but everybody understands the impulse. Where no landmarks exist, we may even make our own by etching initials, symbols, or epithets into rocks or trees, returning to visit these sites again and again throughout life.
When I visited Walden Pond for the first time, I picked up a pebble from the shore and put it in my pocket. Months later, when I found myself leaving a village I had come to love as my home, I left the pebble behind, as if to weave the story of my life and attachments into the terrain, connecting space and place. We modern folk may lack songlines or elaborate creation stories, but we do what we can to weld ourselves to the landscape with whatever tools we can devise. A part of this impulse must surely arise because, deep in our bones, we understand the need to belong to particular places. Landmarks, because they locate us, are integral to the fulfillment of that need.
CHAPTER 3
LOOKING FOR ROUTES
HOW WE TRY TO KEEP TRACK OF WHERE WE ARE
BY NOTING WHERE WE HAVE BEEN
The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
In an ancient Greek legend, King Minos of Knossos commanded his brilliant engineer, Daedalus, to build a safe confinement for the Minotaur, a hideous beast born of an illicit union between Minos’s wife and a white bull thrown from the sea by Poseidon. Daedalus built a labyrinth—an enormous cavern filled with passages of vast complexity and almost impossible to navigate. Not only did this elaborate construction keep the citizens of Knossos safe from the Minotaur but it provided Minos with a good outlet to vent his spleen over the death of his son, Androgeos, who had been murdered while traveling in Athens. To avenge Androgeos’s death, Minos had Athenian virgins shipped to Knossos and sent into the labyrinth for the pleasure, and sustenance, of the Minotaur.
This ritual continued until Theseus, the brave son of the Athenian king Aegus, persuaded his father to allow him to cross the sea to slay the Minotaur. Theseus traveled to Knossos, dispatched the beast, and found his way safely out of the labyrinth. Theseus had some help. Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, provided a long length of thread that Theseus unwound behind him as he made his way through the labyrinth, allowing him to find his way back to freedom.
The story of the labyrinth, the Minotaur, and Ariadne’s thread finds resonance with us because we understand implicitly that we have a fragile grasp on place, and because of our deep human fear of becoming lost. The thread that ultimately saved Theseus’s life was a substitute for a missing piece of navigational equipment: we often become lost because we cannot keep track of our position by remembering our own movements. Some of the most dramatic stories of our failures of navigation come from accounts of the experiences of wilderness explorers, and some of these come about when we have no equivalent of the priceless thread provided to Theseus by Ariadne. The very worst cases usually come about when we are either unable or unwilling to make allowances for our own fragile grip on space.
Edward Atkinson, surgeon and base camp commander on Robert Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition of 1910-1913, pushed at the door of his warm cabin and peeked through the crack into a blizzard. His destination, a scant 30 meters from the cabin, was a set of weather instruments. Though the readings seemed a foregone conclusion, the data had to be logged, and it was his turn. He looked at the stacks of cold-weather gear groaning from hooks near the door. Shrugging his shoulders, he pulled wind gear over his clothes, leaving his heavy coat and warm fur-lined boots where they lay. He wanted to finish quickly and return to his bed.
He pushed his way outside. The wind slammed the door shut behind him. In two steps, he was enveloped in swirls of blowing snow. The instruments lay straight ahead, but he could see nothing through the snow. He staggered forward, counting steps. In fair weather, the 30 meters would pass with the same number of paces. Walking into headwind, eyes closed against the stinging pricks of driven snow, it was more difficult to judge. Two hundred? Three? Amid the shrieking confusion of the storm, Atkinson lost count. Deciding he had gone too far, he turned around. The wind, constantly changing direction, knocked him to his knees. He crawled forward, feeling his way ahead, hoping to grasp rocky landmarks. Time slowed. His body first chilled and then began to heat up. He felt the burn of hypothermia and resisted the urge to throw off his hood and open buttons. His hands found resistance against a rocky ledge. He followed the ledge for as long as he was able. He felt unconsciousness closing in and staved it off by repeating short phrases to himself, trying to conjure images of family and friends. A fatal drowsiness crept into the worn edges of his consciousness. He kicked an opening in the side of a snowdrift. Without his warm boots, he would lose his feet, but he thought if he could get out of the wind, he might live for a few more hours. Lying back, he felt resignation creeping into his numb body, ready to accept death if this was his time. As if it were responding to his acquiescence, the wind let up
slightly. Through slits of half-closed eyes, he saw a hazy glow above him. Mistaking it for a welcoming angel, he raised his head. Beneath the lonely confusion of deep hypothermia, he was able to make out a few bold contours. The storm was ending. The light was from the moon. Atkinson summoned the last traces of his will and dragged himself up the low hill to the cabin. He had been out in the storm for four hours.1 (He did not lose his feet.)
Considering the adverse circumstances—the changing wind direction, the blinding snow, and his inadequate protection from the cold—Atkinson’s quick and profound descent into disorientation is not surprising. What is more interesting is his lack of circumspection in thinking that he could find his way down the barren slope to his instruments and back to his cabin without the proper use of his senses. Atkinson’s attitude on this frigid, wind-blasted night was deeply symptomatic of one major conceptual shortcoming of Scott’s entire expedition: these incredibly brave men, determined to reach the South Pole by whatever means, set out without having taken heed of the physical and mental hardships that were in store for them. Not only did they have inappropriate equipment (ponies instead of dogs) and training (they soon discarded the skis they had brought with them, not knowing how to use them) but they lacked an appreciation for the fragile grasp that we human beings have on our sense of implacement, our knowledge of where we are, our spatial relationship with the objects that surround us, and the movements we need to make to reach them.