Out of the Woods (18 page)

I understood it now. And while I still suspected that my fears about finding my way might be too deeply ingrained and intractably neurotic to reform, I wrote a letter to Marty.

Marty agreed to put me through a two-day course, instructing me in the basics of what is technically known as land navigation. In his reply, he assured me that anybody could learn how to find their way, and it was that offhand assurance that I clung to. But I had my doubts.

 

B
y the time I met up with Marty it was late spring. I got lost, of course. Despite Marty's careful instructions, I had turned to my cell phone in a moment of uncertainty, and the phone had led me to a road taken out by a gully washer two years earlier. Marty wasn't surprised when I finally lumbered into view of the rough shed in which he teaches the classroom portion of his courses. It's why he doesn't include GPS in his instruction. People won't follow their own eyes anymore, he said. They're so dependent on technology they can't do anything for themselves.

We tried to get right to work, but the drumming rain on the metal roof over the shed had us yelling to be heard, and we retreated to the house, where Aggie made us tea.

We sat in the kitchen, waiting for the weather to lift.

Marty had mentioned something at Doe Camp about the importance of being prepared at all times for just about anything, so we talked about what he took with him when leaving the house. It was a pretty impressive list: three knives, including a Bark River all-purpose camping knife handmade to his specifications, a Bravo Necker 2 that he wore on a lanyard under his shirt, and a smaller model in a sheath at his ankle, just in case. In case of what, wasn't clear, but I wouldn't want to be the terrorist chihuahua that crossed his path.

The knives were just the beginning: there were also a standard compass, a wrist compass, and a .357 Smith & Wesson stainless steel five-shot revolver, which he was licensed to carry concealed in forty-one states—he was working on the remaining nine. In addition he wouldn't even go to Walmart without a lightweight compressible thermal body bag that folded up to the size of a pocket handkerchief, and of course a sparking flint and a small tube of cotton soaked in petroleum jelly.

All of which makes sense if you believed, as Marty did, that the end of freedom as we knew it was close at hand, that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the like were in league with the anti-Christ, that there wasn't much difference left between us and North Korea, and that any sane man or woman had a ten-year supply of canned goods and dried meats stored in his or her home or bunker for the coming apocalypse.

It would have been easy to dismiss Marty Simon as a cartoon version of a right-wing gun nut. The reason I didn't was Marty himself. There was a kindness about the man, a sense of integrity and character that prevented such easy facile stereotyping. I would trust Marty Simon with my life, I remember thinking. A grand statement that usually means nothing, and maybe it occurred to me because at that time I was myself in survivalist mode from the whole cancer ordeal. But something about the man made me think about the number of people I knew about whom I could make that statement. The list was extremely short.

The rain began to let up, reminding Marty of why I was there, and we got down to business. People got lost, Marty said, out of a combination of ignorance and arrogance. They don't prepare, they don't look at a map and plot a route, they don't know how far they're capable of walking in a given amount of time and at what pace. They don't bring what they need in case something goes wrong, and they don't pay attention: to the landscape, to the way in front of them and the path behind. And in the end, they lose control, shutting down the very parts of their brain that they need to survive. You've got to know you, he said. I can't tell you that often enough. And he couldn't, though it would take a long time for me to understand what he meant by it.

Marty divided his classroom instruction into map and compass, first individually, then in combination, before heading out to put them to practical use in the field. With great deliberation he pulled out a deeply creased topographical map of the area in which the Wilderness Survival Center was located, smoothed it out on the kitchen table, giving me one of his sidelong glances that took in the anxiety and fear of failure that must have been radiating from my side of the kitchen table. I could see the thought
this might take a while
crossing his face.

He was right. When I thought about maps, to the extent that I did, it was usually from two very different approaches. The first was simple intimidation—I had never been able to read even the simplest of maps, and my incompetence baffled me. At the same time, I loved maps, the very idea of them, the supreme audacity of what this two-dimensional rendering of the world was aiming to accomplish.

Look at a map and logic blooms, orderly and incontrovertible. There is the world rendered submissive to reason, destinations linear, alternatives manifest. North is up and south is down, east to the right and west to the left. Maps present a comforting vision of the world, reducing infinite distances to a grid composed of precisely drawn horizontal and vertical lines, tethering treacherous winds to a four-pointed star. There is no arguing with a map. Yes, you can get there from here, the map proclaims, and this is the path you must take.

But a map begins as a trick of the eye, a sleight of hand, the round rumpled sphere of the earth made flat and smooth and fitted to a rectangular piece of paper. Already you are in the land of the counterintuitive, and in fact everything about direction speaks to this ineffably human quality of trying to impress a logical sense of order on a chaotic and shifting world. Even the four cardinal directions—north, east, south, west—began as an act of hubris, defined not by the contours of the world itself but by those of the human body: anthropologists believe the first directions were simply up and down, back and front.

There were maps before there was writing, scratched on cave walls, on papyrus and parchment, and from the beginning they have represented more than a simple picture of where things are in relation to one another; the earliest maps pointed the way to paradise. They are works of both poetry and prose, metaphor and explication, of wild imagination and narrowest calculation, a place where faith and reason both collide and coexist, a tracing—in the eyes of Gerardus Mercator, the Renaissance cartographer—of the hand of God.

I don't remember how much of this I tried to impart to Marty in a desperate attempt to conceal my inability to understand what he was talking about, but I knew I was in pretty deep when I found myself telling him about how you should never walk widdershins around a church, because by going counterclockwise, or opposite to the sun, people thought they might enter the land of the fairies.

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.