The Lost Art of Finding Our Way
by John Edward Huth
First Posted July 2013
This piece of writing functions exactly how I hope every review I’ve done might—at first, I didn’t remember this book even a little. But a lot came flooding back, even after a decade, once I read through the text. It also reminded me I was (am?) quite shit at using the semicolon.
A physical book is a finite object, but the question of where it truly begins involves a more metaphysical debate. Does the book begin and end at the front covers? Should one eschew the informational precursors—publication and Library of Congress numbers, for example—to dive directly into the text in "Chapter One"? Perhaps a hardcover boundary of the summation located on the front flap and the early review blurbs on the back? For the average reader, these are no longer rhetorical but concrete and answerable questions: the simple metrics of reading have been laid to bare thanks to e-reader technology. Who looks at the dedication; who checks the publication dates; who reads the foreword; who reads the author’s biography—and for how long. What’s been highlighted; where you linger; where you stop. If you finish. If you skim. If you flip to the last page first.
A reader that skips or skims the dedication page of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way would miss out on a fascinating puzzle that adds depth to the book in a personal and unique way:
Dedicated to the memories of
Sarah Aronoff and Mary Jagoda
No one is lost . . . to God
A check of the back flap illuminates nothing—the author is not a theologian but a Harvard science professor. The mystery of the elegiac dedication remains shrouded by its peculiar specificity. Presented with no new information, the reader must abandon this page and move on, dedication unsolved. Comprehension presumably only available to those select few that know the author personally. C’est la vie.
But shortly thereafter, something happens: names are mentioned, a phrase pops up. How closely were you paying attention? Wait, let me flip back to the dedication—oh my, yes! They are the same names. Oh, what an absolutely stunning dedication page; what terrible, perfect use:
Unknown to me at that moment, two young women were lost in the same fogbank less than half a mile away, disoriented and struggling for their lives. Before they set out on what was supposed to be a quick paddle in Nantucket Sound, Sarah Aronoff, 19, and Mary Jagoda, 20, told their boyfriends that they would be back in ten minutes. When they didn’t return forty-five minutes later, the boys contacted the authorities, triggering a massive search effort. The next day Coast Guard Helicopters flew back and forth across the Sound, eventually finding their two empty kayaks. The day after, Sarah’s body was found. Mary’s body was never recovered.
Weeks later I was crushed when I saw a memorial to Mary on the beach, reading “No one is lost...to God.” What happened? No one really knows, but they probably got disoriented in the fog and mistakenly paddled out to sea rather than back to shore.
And so The Lost Art of Finding Our Way captures a peculiar sense of urgency, a need to deliver the didacticism that Ms. Aronoff and Ms. Jagoda never received to those still able to take advantage of it. But it is not all misty-eyed wistfulness—there is serious science here, delivered in a palatable way. When the scientific principles are woven into historical tapestry, the near-magical can become even more amazing:
In 1967 Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou suggested that the Vikings used something called a “sunstone” to find the direction of the Sun using the polarization of the sky. Part of this was based on a section of one of the sagas, Harafns Saga:”The weather was thick and stormy....The king looked about and saw no blue sky....then the king took out the Sunstone and held it up, and then he saw where the Sun beamed from the stone.”
Calcite is also known as Iceland spar and is found in large quantities in eastern Iceland. According to a number of accounts, spar crystals were highly prized during the Viking era. Spar has an unusual of birefringence, meaning that light is bent through the crystal at two different angles, depending on the polarization state of the light. This will give rise to two images of light from an object passing through the spar. Pure crystals of calcite are rhombohedral in structure, meaning that their sides each describe a rhombus. The sides of the crystal are associated with the polarization state, so when the side of the crystal is aligned properly, one of two polarization states is extinguished.
Further detailing—capturing the angle and height of the sun in the sky versus the heavy low-lying fogbanks of the Nordic regions—explains why the the particular geographic location of the Norse would make such an object useful, while a culture such as the Pacific Islanders would not. But for every mystical “sunstone” that has its place in reality, another seemingly believable fantasy is dashed:
People should be suspicious about the moss-on-the-north-side folklore because many factors create a dark, damp environment. If trees are on the north side of a hill, their bases are perpetually shaded and the base of their trunks can be fully ringed with moss. In the middle of a dense forest where the floor is covered in shade, there is little distinction between the north and south side of a tree for favorable growth conditions. Prevailing wind directions and windbreaks also play a significant, if not dominant, role.
Another favorite aphorism, Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning, is mostly debunked as conjecture. For some people, discovering that they are citing Jesus of New Testament fame—Matthew XVI: 2-3 “When in evening, ye say, it will be fair weather: For the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be foul weather today; for the sky is red and lowering”—might be a bit startling if you’ve been parroting it without knowledge of its provenance.
Etymology makes a strong showing as well:
Following to the east of Orion are his two faithful hunting dogs, Canis Major (big dog) and Canis Minor (little dog). Sirius, in Canis Major, is the brightest star in the sky. Its rising just before the Sun in the morning represented the season of the flood in the Nile to the ancient Egyptians. Many ancient Greeks and Romans thought that the combination of the heat of the Sun and Sirius’s appearance was responsible for summer, hence the name “dog days.”
If ancient Egypt isn’t your thing, perhaps some quasi-contemporary Americana:
The British Royal Navy created a standard for marking lead lines. Intertwined with the rope were markers of various colors coded for the depth. Black leather was tied at two and three fathoms, white at five, red at seven, and black at ten, with knots for greater depth tied every five fathoms. After retrieving the lead a leadsman would report back the phrase, “By the mark,” or “By the deep” followed by the depth in fathoms. So “By the mark, five,” would report a sounding of five fathoms. This was also a common phrase in the United States. The American author Samuel Clemens took his pen name from this phrase based on his experiences as a pilot on Mississippi steamboats. “Mark twain” is a report of a depth of two fathoms.
Or another tidbit drawn from the Nordic regions:
The Norse used a steering board, or starboard, which is a long plank extended into the water from the right-hand side of the boat. By adjusting the angle of the steering board, the navigator could hold or shift the course of the vessel. In many ways the starboard acts like a wing, generating a force akin to lift for a wing to move the stern of the boat to left or right, depending on its orientation. The starboard was, by convention, on the right-hand side. When bringing the knarr to a dock or unloading onto land, the starboard side was kept to the water, and the left, or port, side was where the vessel was unloaded. This practice is the origin of the terms port for left and starboard for right.
The Lost Art of Finding our Way covers a very wide range, and does it all very well. Personal taste will, like most things, count for a lot. A reader who prefers history and word origins will be extremely pleased. The scientific discussions—while incredibly detailed—are interesting and remain comprehensible:
Waves will build slowly as wind first skims the surface, creating what’s called a cat’s paw: very tiny ripples. Once little ripples are created, wind gains traction on the vertical faces, causing the waves to build to progressively larger heights. As it builds in height, a wave crest becomes steeper and steeper, finally becoming unstable and tumbling over. This instability occurs when the wave height is greater than one-seventh of the wavelength and also when the interior angle of the peak of a wave is less than 120 degrees.
It makes logical sense that water waves would have a particular height-to-length ratio and a specific angle from which they will fall. The trick is in realizing that there is a question that can be asked in the first place, an order underlying the chaos—not just a collection of random water falling all over itself.
A feeling of wonder pervades The Lost Art of Finding Our Way: tales of “sunstones” and “celestial huts”, “portolan charts” and “ecliptics” make it hard to not get wrapped up in the obscure and the exotic. But it is the more mundane aspects of peregrination that can truly astound:
Our perceptions function in two roles: First, the sight of familiar landmarks helps us update our location in the internal map. Second, the sight of objects drawing nearer as we approach them and receding into the distance behind us gives us a sense of speed and motion. We usually take all of this for granted.
Technology—maps, astrolabes, GPS devices—may make finding our destination more simple every day. But finding our way rarely gets any easier.