Wild Signs and Star Paths: Key #12, The Light and Dark Woods

[kylec]

This series is an exploration of the works of Tristan Gooley. I’ll document my efforts to learn to read nature’s signs. If you enjoy reading, I encourage you to support the author by purchasing a copy of Wild Sings and Star Paths (UK) or The Nature Instinct (US). I’m in no way affiliated with the author, nor do I profit from sales of the book.

Last Week’s Work

To navigate by the invisible handrail—any relatively straight and continuous feature that serves as a safety net for venturing beyond. To identify my local handrails.

New World

Just as we hold onto a handrail for balance, we can cling to long features of the land to stabilize our orientation. Anything that runs in roughly the same direction for a decent stretch can work. That includes roads, trails, railroad tracks, streams and rivers, coastline, even mountains. Let’s say I park along the side of a gravel road that I know runs north and south for miles. To the right is a thick wilderness area. That means I can explore the area as much as I want, even to the point of losing sight of the road for long periods of time, provided I can find at least one reliable way to show me west. West is the direction of my handrail, and if I find it, all I have to do is follow it back to my vehicle.

By keeping the road to my left and continuing north, I need only find it again and keep it to my right to return. The tricky part is that I do need to be able to find the road again. It’s impossible to miss if I go west, but I will need to use another sign, or several (you know, like all the ones in the book) so point me back. It helps if before I leave my handrail, I mark the position of the sun, the direction of the wind, and any prominent land features that can be seen from the wider area. As I venture away, I can note if the vegetation has a preference in the direction it grows, or if grasses are pressed down by the wind a certain way. Tristan Gooley recommends starting with sort jaunts. Find yourself a handrail, walk just until it disappears, then find it again. Once you’re comfortable, you can extend the amount of time the handrail is out of sight from a minute and a few yards, to days and many miles.

My area is made up of such reliable handrails that I have no hope of getting lost unless I cross the mountains, the tallest handrail and never really invisible. On my side, I have those mountains, a coastline, a freeway, and train tracks that all run the same east-west direction with a slight northwest-southeast veer. The mountains are always in view, and the coast is usually easy to guess by cloud patterns. This is useful to me, because I’m too ornery to own a smartphone, which means that even in the city there’s a risk of getting lost without a GPS. But as long as I keep my handrails in mind, and even add a few more like the main drag, or significant through-streets, I have an entire grid that always gives me my bearings.

In a sense, the invisible handrail is our road home, even if home is just the car that brings us there. We have three sides of freedom and risk, but we maintain one stable anchor to aid our explorations. This is as true of life as of the physical environment. It’s usually healthy to have a core group of people we return to though we may interact with many more, and a few daily routines that ground us though we may spend much of our time testing new possibilities. It may not sound very adventurous to cling to a rail like a kid at the skate rink, but if anything, the confidence from knowing we’ve set a limit that will bring us home allows us to explore much more bravely than if we simply wandered in an unbounded territory.

Key #12: The Light and Dark Woods

Visibility is severely limited in woodlands, but we can get a sense for clearings, firebreaks, trails, etc. by light patterns. More sunlight penetrates these areas, but it also reflects more off the grass, and silhouettes the trees between it and ourselves. The sound of increased birdsong, wind rustling, and even lichens can point us toward the place where we’ll clear the brush long before we actually come upon the spot.