Out of the Woods

by Lynn Darling

  And not the good kind either, I concluded.

  Right, Marty said. Then slowly, as if talking someone down from a ledge, he began to explain the topo map.

  At first it seemed a head-splitting and most likely impossible exercise in deciphering hieroglyphics. Topographic maps, as issued by the U.S. Geological Survey, are compiled from photographs taken by the National Aerial Photography Program with specialized cameras embedded in planes flying at precisely consistent altitudes in a north-south direction along predetermined flight lines. It took ten such photographs to provide the stereoscopic coverage necessary and at least five years of calculation and observation to compile the 7.5 minutes of latitude and longitude represented by the map spread out in front of me.

  The result is a large rectangle of soft thin paper covered in swirling green and brown lines and dotted with circles and squares in black, blue, and, occasionally, red, which at first bear little or no resemblance to the physical world, but which gradually reveal themselves to represent every natural feature and man-made object that lies between you and where you want to go.

  In addition there was a host of numbers to confront. Think of the earth as a giant magnet, Marty said. The movement of the molten outer core around an inner core crystallized by gravitational pressure generates a roughly bar-shaped magnetic field that shoots through the globe from the North Pole to the South Pole—more or less. While true north lies directly beneath Polaris, the North Star, magnetic north, the one toward which the compass points, is somewhat to the left, in our hemisphere. The discrepancy varies the farther west you travel, and map and compass are caught between the two, the map indicating true north, the compass magnetic north. In my front yard, for instance, the compass’s idea of north is 15.5 degrees to the west of true north; in Fairbanks, Alaska, it is about 27 degrees east. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the location of magnetic north moves over time, because of changes in the earth’s core: in 2009, for instance, it was still in Canadian territory but heading toward Russia at the rate of thirty-four to thirty-seven miles per year.

  Okay, I didn’t get all or, for that matter, any of this at first, except in an occasional flash of insight where I could suddenly see what was going on between compass and core, map and star, before the whole thing vanished into murky seas again. But that didn’t matter so much as the fact that the entire scale of things had changed: we were no longer talking about some abstract arithmetical problem that invoked my dread of numbers and three-dimensional thinking but of something concrete and physical—immense, yes, but real nonetheless, a planet spinning, a star fixed, a jumpy little needle inclined always toward home. Direction wasn’t about what was in my head anymore; it was about the world.

  And, gradually, that world unfolded. The mysterious squiggly lines became an intricately detailed panorama of information. Contour lines, the soft sepia undulating circles that are the predominate feature of a topo map, could be translated into specific images of the terrain—where the land was level and easily traversed; where it was steep; the change in elevation over a given distance. The more closely one studied the map, the more there was to see: the seemingly random numbers were actually fixed intervals, denoting elevations—count the number of contour lines you cross and that number will yield the change in elevation. The map could tell you where a river ran too fast to be forded, or was too deep to cross, where a chasm would yield to a less treacherous passage, when to take the direct route and when the long way around was the wiser choice, because those wavy blue lines meant a swamp, and that seemingly inconsequential hill was as steep as Denali. Little black dots were houses, larger ones a barn or maybe a school; logic would tell you which. Red was a main road; purple, a state park; a solid blue, a river; an intermittent one, a seasonal creek that dried up in summer.

  It can take a lifetime to master reading a topo map, but the most important lessons are more easily learned, although like most of life’s lessons they must be learned over and over again.

  One of the skills Marty pushed most relentlessly that first morning at the kitchen table was the importance of orienting the map. This is not a complicated idea: to most people it’s probably strikingly obvious. But I found it almost impossible to understand at first, coming as I did from a lifetime of bending the world to my own notions instead of taking it as I found it.

  The concept is simple enough: if you were to draw a map of your living room, but you were holding it the wrong way, the map would take you in the wrong direction, no matter how detailed and accurate it was. Farther afield, it’s clearly even more important: if you are holding the map with north at the top, because that is the way you can read it, but you are heading south, then you will march off in the opposite direction. To correct for this, you align the two realities so that north at the top of the map is the same direction as north on the compass and you have turned the map until it mirrors the direction in which you’re headed.

  It was hard going, and we practiced at the kitchen table for a long time; I had a rough time getting rid of the map in my head, the one that said that north was straight ahead no matter which way the map was turned, and trusting instead the one laid out in front of me. In my brain, whatever I’m looking at is north, an attitude I apparently carry over to my friends, who unanimously agree I am one of the bossiest people on the planet (although I’ve always thought I was something of a pussycat). The rusty hinges of my egocentric certainty took a lot of coaxing to finally loosen up. Practice, Marty advised. It would take a lot of it. But if I could start looking at the world and the direction I was taking as it really was, I might actually end up at the place I had set out for. It seemed too good to be true.

  Marty made a point of emphasizing that none of this worked if you didn’t study the map before you actually headed for a destination. Acquiring an accurate idea of which way to go was almost impossible without preparation: planning a route, taking note of the obstacles, calculating the time.

  To this I objected. From the time I moved to Vermont I had been asking nearly everyone I met in the woods how they found their way in the maze of old logging roads, bridle trails, uncut brush, and meandering stone walls through which they wandered. They always looked at me kind of funny—I guess to them it was a little like asking how they breathed. They just knew where they were, they told me.

  That’s what I want, I told Marty. I want that kind of sense of direction. Where I always know where I am. I want to be able to read the landscape, to gauge from the sun and the trees where I am, to carry the direction home in my head.

  Marty shook his head. I can show you a few things that will help you, he said, if you’re lost without a map or compass. But what you’re talking about, that’s not an instinct or being one with the woods or any of that crap. The people you’re talking about, they know the area. They’re familiar with the landscape. They have probably been walking those woods for years.

  I had to admit that made sense. Marty’s words called to mind a line from a documentary I’d seen. Two Alabama hunters are asked how they find their way in the trackless swamps in which they roam. We don’t need to know north or south, says one of them. We got the trees named.

  And that is the crux of the matter. So much of direction, of having a sense of direction, is bound up in a sense of place, of knowing where home lies even when you don’t know exactly where you are. If you have walked a wood for so many years that the trees have names and characters, are by way of being old friends, then the route you take is a kind of songline, a path of memory, mood, desire, regret, of passing moments and striking images that create maps more durable than anything on paper or beeping bits of metal and plastic.

  In my neighborhood, it is much the same. When I first arrived in South Woodstock, I was asking directions constantly, and just as constantly coming away confounded. How do I get to the store? I would ask the two guys mudbugging on a dirt road whose name I didn’t know. Easy, they would say. Just walk three hundred yards and hang a left at Connor’s pond. He
ad down toward the Fullerton cemetery, but if you hit the Giddyup Road, you’ve gone too far east.

  The Giddyup Road?

  Yeah, the bumpy one where those boys crashed their rig that summer. We call it the Giddyup Road.

  Ah, yes. Thanks.

  But I wasn’t from South Woodstock and I would never share that sense of familiarity and long association. The thing I wanted—the ineffable ability to read the landscape, to find clues in the lay of the land, whether you knew the place or not—apparently didn’t exist. I felt a little disappointed. Maybe like the ancients, I needed direction to retain a little magic.

  The rain finally stopped and Marty and I went back out to wilderness headquarters to practice using the compass in the real world.

  I learned how to shoot a bearing, so that I could set a course toward an object that couldn’t be seen in the distance. “Pretend your Jeep is a mountain,” Marty said, “and tell me what direction you would have to walk to get to it.” I stood out in the field, holding the compass level, with its sight line aimed at Mount Jeep. Then I slowly rotated the bezel surrounding its face until the north sign was directly over the north needle, what Marty calls “putting the red in the shed.” That done, the small notch in the front of the compass now told me that the Jeep was 260 degrees northwest of where I stood. Eureka! For an instant, the connection between a planet wobbling its way around the sun, a distant star, a thin red needle, and a muddy set of wheels made sense, and I marveled at the elegance of it all. Maybe I could do this.

  I spent much of the next day marching up and down a dirt road. Marty was adamant that pacing was instrumental to finding your way: it all started, he said, with the ancient Romans, who devised the first unit of long-distance calculation, the mille passuum, or “one thousand paces,” each pace consisting of two steps: a thousand Roman paces worked out roughly to five thousand feet, and eventually the Roman mille passuum evolved into the English mile.

  Pacing, Marty said, was a way of measuring distance in the field: if I knew how long it normally took me to cover a known distance, I could predict how far (or far afield) I had traveled in the woods. I would know, for instance, that if I had traveled for two hours in the direction of a lake and that in that time I normally covered about two miles over rough terrain, then I would know whether or not to be worried if the lake was nowhere in sight.

  Marty was right, that was pretty cool, but practicing pacing was boring when it wasn’t frustrating. Because everyone’s individual pace is different—depending on the length of their legs and their style of walking, two people both six feet tall can have strides that vary in length significantly—it was important to learn your own. You did this by practicing, on different kinds of terrain, and under different conditions—uphill in high grass, downhill on gravel, in the rain and in the heat—learning how your own body reacted and adjusted to changing circumstances, so that eventually you would have a rough idea of your own individual average rate of speed. That Greek guy Socrates knew what he was talking about, Marty said. You’re gonna have to learn you.

  Marty had laid out a course on the long flat dirt road leading to his camp marked off in hundred-feet increments. With paper and pencil in hand I walked to the first marker, counting my paces in military fashion, leading with my right foot, and counting two steps as one pace. I wrote down the number of paces and then, starting once again at zero, counted off the paces to the next marker and then again to the third. On the return, I counted the paces straight back from the three-hundred-foot marker to the beginning. Then we compared the individual segments with one another, looking to see how consistent the number was.

  Eventually, Marty said, we would arrive at the length of my average pace—a number, I gathered from the tone in which Marty explained this, that would rival the square root of pi in significance.

  And so I paced. First up the road, then down the road. I tried to walk the way I usually walk, and to count—and one, and two, and—without letting my mind wander, but my numbers were wildly inconsistent. It was as if I had minced along in a kimono for one segment and galloped through a strenuous polka the next.

  For a while Marty was undaunted, but at last even he gave up. I’m only teaching you the tools, he said. Then you’re going to have to practice. He suggested I make myself a set of pacing beads, so that I could tick off one bead for every ten paces I walked, which would give me a rough idea of the distance I’d traveled and, assuming I regularly checked my watch, the length of time it had taken me to get that far. It sounded like a lot of work. Did Aggie have pacing beads? Aggie doesn’t need pacing beads, Marty said. She has me.

  Finally I was ready for a field exercise in which I would put together what I had learned so far. Marty had a course laid out, consisting of four posts positioned in a rough quadrangle over a large field normally used, he said, for tomahawk throwing competitions. I was to site my compass on each post successively, writing down the compass reading and following it until I could see the next post, while also measuring my paces. Done correctly, the bearings would bring me full circle back to my starting point and would correspond to the ones Marty had measured with a surveyor’s instrument. My paces would tell me how long each side of the quadrangle was.

  It took me about an hour. I walked with a Zen-like consciousness of every detail of that patch of ground, from the density of the brush, to the quality of the light and the strength of the breeze, as I tried to get the most accurate reading possible on the compass. The hyperattention made the terrain exotic, as if I were walking through heavy jungle or frozen tundra. I felt oddly confident—despite my shaky hold on what I was doing, there was something aside from myself to trust, a set of skills that, if relied upon correctly, would carry me through. In an odd way, it wasn’t up to me.

  At the end, I compared my compass readings with the accurate ones, and my paces with the actual length of the course. The results were a decidedly mixed bag: my compass readings were pretty good, while my paces, not surprisingly, were spectacularly off. I was excited about the compass, which was beginning to make sense, and while I knew I would never become deeply acquainted with a set of pacing beads, I saw why Marty was so set on my understanding the underlying concept. It was another way of keeping oneself in the present, of staying attuned to what you were doing and how you were doing it in an environment as changeable and unpredictable as the natural world.

  We crammed in a lot over my two days at the Wilderness Survival Center and still just broke the surface of the intricacies of land navigation. Working with the map and the compass together, I learned the rudiments of determining my location by aligning the three-dimensional world around me to the two-dimensional one on paper, and how to work the same idea in reverse, using distinctive features and compass readings on the map to indicate which mountain or lake I might happen to be facing.

  None of it would be of much help for the kind of navigation I had in mind, Marty said, the wandering about in the woods where there was little in the way of landmarks to act as guides and waypoints. That would only come in time and with a lot of practice, if it came at all. At the end he demonstrated some of the more homespun methods of finding your way—how to assess direction from the angle of the sun on an analog watch; how to determine north and south by the way a shadow falls from a stick planted in the ground; how to locate the North Star and calculate declension from the night sky. But Marty disdained the wilderness types who claimed that such skills were all you need, who believed that if you listened hard enough, you could hear the trees talking. Don’t try to be friends with nature, he said. Nature will kill you. I tell people on my Web site, if you’re looking for God or a spiritual experience, you’re in the wrong place.

  I left the Wilderness Survival Center bemused. Direction was not as difficult as I imagined, nor as fundamental as I hoped. Wayfinding was an art both simple and complicated: simple in its individual components, complex in the harmonies that map and compass, time and terrain, broad estimates and detailed calibrations mu
st achieve. Direction was not beholden to grace or instinct; it was a puzzle that yielded to preparation, precision, and patience, to self-knowledge and a large dose of humility in the face of the unknown. None of which I possessed in any measurable quantity, but then, I had time. Sometimes, when you are lost, in life, as in the woods, the best thing you can do is stay put.

  Finding my way, Marty had said, came down to practice, not merely because practice would make the now exotic techniques of wayfinding more familiar, but because practice led to experience—not only of map and compass but of the person using them. Learning how not to get lost was about knowing your own limitations, about what you couldn’t do and didn’t know, as much as it was about the reverse.

  I thought about that on the drive home. About the need to factor in one’s own limitations when charting any kind of course. The trick was weeding out the insubstantial stuff of fear from the basic elements of who you were, the nature of your own nature, the quirks and distortions in the fabric of your character that made you who you were.

  I got lost for many reasons. For one, I had been too lazy to learn the basics of navigation, a neglect I was now doing something about. That should help with the fear. But I also got lost because I daydreamed, and daydreaming was one of the best parts of walking for me. I would have to figure out a way to account for that predilection, to figure out a way to fit my spacey ways into a plan that would also get me home. That’s what Marty meant when he said, You have to learn you. Not just your strengths but also your limitations. I was glad he included the latter. It gave me a great deal more to work with.

  Heading up the road to Castle Dismal, I also thought about something else Marty had said: to know where you are going, you need to know where you have been. Looking back, fixing in your mind the path behind you, was as important as going forward.