Physical Intelligence by Scott Grafton

Author:Scott Grafton
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

6

Perspectives

A pool, a stone, a bush, a rise of ground so slight as to be hardly perceptible, objects which a European scarcely notices, are deeply impressed in their memory, and serve years afterwards to guide them over the trackless and desert steppe.

—FERDINAND VON WRANGELL1

THERE WAS NO sunrise. Only shadowy gloom in all directions. I was encased in a thick blanket of clouds that clung to the mountains like a London fog, enshrouding everything near and far. Yesterday’s snow had turned to a night of rain, rendering everything cold and damp to the touch. It was impossible to tell where the sun was rising or any cardinal direction. I could only infer what might be a westerly direction from the orientation I had pitched my tent in the night before: the door had faced a setting sun. I was up on a high plateau that hung like a broad shelf off a now invisible peak. A few miles away, the mountains walled me off. In the opposite direction I was corralled by a long cliff edge. At least that is what my map showed. I really couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. I needed to cut a diagonal across the shelf and find the one good spot to drop off the cliff, a tight slot providing a welcome portal that would lead down into a valley far below. Descending from the edge anywhere else would be a horror show of tenuous down-climbing on slime-covered bluffs. I didn’t have a compass, but I could still draw a compass rose in the dirt by using the orientation of the tent. I studied my paper map, trying to find any topographic features that might serve as landmarks. I had to convert a simple line drawn on the map into a mental journey with me positioned at the center. There wasn’t much to work with on the map and not much to see around me. Picking the most likely direction from the compass rose, I headed off, dead reckoning toward the southwest. I was engaged with a gigantic three-dimensional puzzle, ready to trick me at a moment’s notice. On a clear day the hike would have been trivial. There would be points of orientation, distant mountains or passes, beacons calling me on, like a lighthouse signaling safe harbor. Normally I could create different kinds of maps in my mind that would allow me to form a coherent frame of reference. But now, in the cloudy murk, all I had was an arrow in the dirt pointing into the mist and nervous hope that I could keep myself going in that one direction.

The problem I faced was not unlike the problem that any forager faces, whether a human or an ant. The ant leaves its nest and wanders about, trying to find some food. Then it makes a direct path back to the nest. How does it calculate that straight line and, once on it, keep itself going straight? Without markers like scent, light, or geography, the animal or person can rely on pure self-guidance.

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