Override by Caroline Williams

Author:Caroline Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI000000, SEL030000, BIO015000, SCI089000, SCI090000, PSY051000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2017-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

Fig 13. Me, my dog, and my best innocent face.

Incidentally, as we enter the woods on the first day, I’m reminded of a study I read about a while ago that said that dogs align themselves north to south when they poo.9 This is the perfect opportunity to test that on my dog, Jango. And sure enough, more often than not, if I face the same way as him while he does a poo, the belt buzzes at my back. Actually, his compass seems to be a bit off — most of the time he seems to face either south-east or north-west. There must be a snappy way to describe this: bum to the sun? No, that isn’t right … Poo to the pole? I will keep an eye on this; as most of the navigating I am going to do will involve taking the dog out, there is plenty of opportunity to gather data.

The other thing I discover is that the path we enter the woods on faces roughly north-south. The loop I normally do is more or less square, with a few different paths heading off to the sides; I have walked there so often over the years, I have a pretty good mental map of it. The belt backs this up: the paths that I always assumed are going in the same direction as the first path into the woods actually are. Over time, I begin to put this information together for different areas: this path heads north, and my house faces north, so it must be over … there.

As the weeks pass, I find that more and more landmarks in my town start to line up like this. I’m surprised to find that looking across the river in town I was facing north, the same direction as my house faces. If you’d asked me before, I would have guessed that my house faces in the same direction as the river flows, not looking across it. Over time, I can almost see familiar landmarks swivel and slide around in my mind’s eye and click into place, all lining up to north. As a result, the whole layout of my hometown starts to make sense to me for the first time. I know that the nearest big town is north-east of here, and when I find myself driving into the sunset one evening I have a navigational ‘aha’ moment: ‘The sun sets in the west — yep, that makes sense, because town is north-east of here, and it’s behind me and over there.’ I’ve even started noticing how the sun moves through the sky during the day, something that seemed like black magic before. ‘Oh look, the sun is in the south at midday …’ It suddenly seems like a skill that might come in handy if I was ever lost in the wilderness.

I also discover when I get home that my wanderings with the belt in Berlin after I left Klaus’ lab have left me with a pretty accurate mental map of central Berlin.

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