If you’ve ever been lost and alone, you know how terrifying it is. And if you’ve ever watched – or been – that person desperately asking his or her phone for directions, you know how ill-equipped many of us are for the challenges of navigation without modern technology.
Harvard particle physicist, John Huth, got his own taste of that in 2003, while kayaking near Mount Desert Island, in Maine. He'd gone out on a clear day, without a map or compass (the rental shop was out of both). While still a mile from shore, fog rolled in. Huth says that, in the moment he realized his situation, he faced two options: panic, or figure out what he knew and put it to use. He went with the latter, orienting himself relative to wind and wave directions, and made it home safe and sound.
A couple of months later, something similar happened. Fog again rolled in while he was kayaking near his home in Harwich, MA, and, again, he found his way home by hugging the shore and using wind and waves to guide him. But, this time, there were others nearby who weren't so lucky; two young women were kayaking in the same area and got lost in the fog. Only one was ever found, dead.
Huth says survivor's guilt built into an obsession with traditional ways of navigating. He read about early seafarers, the development of celestial navigation, and the neurobiology behind our mental maps. He's currently collaborating with anthropologists to study Pacific islanders with unique navigational approaches, from laying in the bottoms of canoes to feel waves, to following a mysterious phenomenon called "underwater lightning." He even set up a basement laboratory to investigate the possibility that said "lightning" is actually bioluminescence.
Huth's 2013 book, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, is part history, part science, and part pragmatic primer, with instructions for exercises to enhance one's navigational knowledge, skills, and senses. He also teaches a course for Harvard undergraduates, called Primitive Navigation. His goal, he says, is to remind people that it's possible to find our way through the world without a GPS device in-hand; it just takes practice.