How to Get from Here to There

          I have just finished M. R. O’Connor’s interesting, but somehow also disappointing Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (St. Martin’s, 2019).     O’Connor is impressed with the navigating skills of indigenous peoples in the Arctic, the Australian outback, and the waters of Pacific island groups such as the Marshalls. She writes about them after going there and seeing it done. She has many questions about the prodigious memory feats and the lifetime experience behind navigation across miles of barren tundra, desert wastelands, or apparently featureless ocean, without benefit of map, compass, or GPS. None of these questions gets a satisfactory answer.

            One question has to do with the way these wayfinding marvels are performed in the minds of the navigators. Is information about the effects of wind on snow and ice, for example, stored like a mental map, or is the journey accomplished by recognizing landmarks and making successive decisions about which way to turn at each one, without the navigator’s seeing himself in a mental landscape like a map? Though she speaks to many anthropologists who have studied the question, she finds that they disagree “on the theoretical explanation of how humans engage in day-to-day wayfinding.” Is it “survey knowledge,” in which points and landmarks are organized into a two-dimensional relation—like a map—with an “allocentric” viewpoint or perspective, as if one were looking down on oneself while navigating? Or is it “route knowledge,” a sequence of points, landmarks, and natural signs that make a path from one place to another, with an “egocentric” viewpoint, always form the point of view of the wayfarer on the ground?

            Another question she investigates is what researchers know about how and where the brain assembles the knowledge of the expert wayfinder. She discovers that the hippocampus seems to be where memories and a sense of place come together. London taxi drivers, required to learn “the knowledge” of London’s ten thousand streets, have enlarged hippocampi with more gray matter, and damage to the hippocampus impairs memory. Does the hippocampus help us create internal maps, or is our place knowledge organized and used sequentially, like a musical composition? This is another of O’Connor’s unanswered questions.

            She speculates a good deal. Animal research may indicate in migrating animals an internal compass in the form either of a mineral like magnetite or in radical pairs of molecules that respond to geomagnetism, though the former has not been demonstrated beyond a case or two and the latter hasn’t been tested at all. Does language develop at first in order to explain to other member of the community how to navigate to some desirable place—another form of bee dance? Are navigation and storytelling connected?

            Of one thing she is convinced: the erosion of wayfinding skills by the use of compass, map, and GPS is a loss for human beings, whose culture and brains seem to be adapted to assimilate and remember a myriad of clues in the environment to help us find our way to food and back to each other.

            Because O’Connor refers more than once to Harold Gatty’s book on finding your way, I went back to look at Gatty, who is a more satisfying read in several ways. Gatty’s book was titled Nature Is Your Guide: How to Find Your Way on Land or Sea by Observing Nature when it was first published in 1958.  Dover retitled it when they published it as Finding Your Way without Map or Compass. Neither title does justice to what Gatty gives us in this delightful little book. He describes navigation by the Polynesians, the Arabs, and the Scandinavians using migratory routes of birds as guides—and sometimes the birds themselves, as in the land-finding bird releases described in Gilgamesh and Genesis—as well as observations of stars, the use of sea movements such as swells, and the construction of a pre-compass directional device called the pelorus, like a compass card without the needle, that could be oriented by the stars and used to steer a very accurate course over long distances.

            Gatty emphasizes observation more than its practical use in navigation. He praises the lifetime habit of seemingly aimless poking around and looking that turned Gilbert White into the prototype of the naturalist and Charles Darwin into the preeminent biological thinker of the nineteenth century. Baden-Powell and the whole scouting movement also come in for admiring notice. This section reminded me of Russell Hoban’s character Tom, who just looks around and messes around and eventually beats the professionals in Hoban’s delightful children’s classic, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen (1974).

            When Gatty is describing all of the methods one can use to keep from traveling in circles when in the wild, he mentions a navigational trick long-distance flyers can use when their destination is on a natural line such as a river or coastline. The method is one of intentional error: purposely steering to one or the other side of the target far enough to overcome an error that might occur through wind, for example. Then, when the river or coast is reached, the flyer turns the other way along it and soon encounters the target. This reminded me of a harrowing experience Ernest Gann describes in Fate Is the Hunter (1961): he and a copilot were flying toward Corumbá in Brazil using a map with few details over jungle that had no landmarks anyway. They headed straight for the city, which is on the River Paraguay, knowing that winds could push them off course one way or the other. Short of fuel, they come upon the river, but see no town or airfield. Which way to turn? They have fuel enough to explore only one direction. They choose, for no particular reason, south, and they land safely at Corumbá. The episode illustrates Gann’s thesis, expressed in the book’s title, that only fate kept him from joining the 400 dead flyer friends to whom he dedicates the book; listing their names takes four pages at the beginning.

            Why didn’t Gann use the intentional error technique Gatty describes? Gatty was Wiley Post’s navigator in their 1931 round-the-world flight and used the technique to find an airfield on the Amur River in Siberia, where they needed to refuel. Gann’s flight was some years later. Wouldn’t he have known about the method? Or perhaps he did know about and used it, but thought the “which way?” narrative had more suspense and more of the fateful in it.

            Gatty’s book will tell you about the orienting power of shrubs and trees, hills and rivers in ordinary terrain, as well as how to read ocean swells and the color of the sea, finding direction from sand dunes in deserts, and a good deal more particular information. He has a detailed section on sea birds, especially the pelagic ones, complete with pictures. My favorite part of the book is its last chapters, devoted to what can be learned from the moon and the sun, as well as how to find your way around the night sky.   

            So if you are a speculative person who asks many questions and doesn’t need them all to be answered, read O’Connor’s book. If you want more certainty about getting there, less asking about the theoretical basis of what you’re doing, read Gatty’s. Or read them both.