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10.30.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
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day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated November
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twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio e is a
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reading service intended for people who are blind or have
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other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Please join me now for the first article titled It's
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almost impossible for Tristian Gholi to get lost. That's one
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reason he has millions of followers. The British adventurer has
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crossed the Atlantic solo and a plane and a boat.
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Now he reads tree, leaves, puddles and moss to get
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his bearings. By Richard Grant, I'm standing at an intersection
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of footpaths in the woods of West Sussex, England, feeling
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a little uncertain of my bearings. Which one of these
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five paths leads back to the land rover parked I
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think roughly north of here. The summer sun as high
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and obscured by clouds, so not much help. The wind,
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which has been blowing intermittently from the northeast all day,
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providing a reliable navigation guide, has now died away completely,
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and I have no phone, compass or GPS. Standing next
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to me is Tristian Gulie, the Sherlock Homes of Nature,
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as he's nicknamed in the British media. So I am
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in no danger of actually getting lost. This tall, affable
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bearded Englishman fifty two years old and wearing a canvas
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bush hat, is one of the most skilled navigators on
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the planet. He's a master yachtsman and pilot who has
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risked his life on long solo adventures using conventional navigation instruments.
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But his greatest expertise is in natural navigation, the ancient,
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mostly lost art of finding direction by reading the signs
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and clues in nature. He has studied the directional techniques
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of the Tuareg, Bedwin, Dayak, and other indigenous peoples around
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the Earth. He's tested Viking seafaring methods in a small
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boat in the North Atlantic, and has written a series
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of award winning and internationally best selling books about natural navigation, weather,
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water and more. His latest out this fall, is The
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Hidden Seasons, a calendar of Nature's clues. Observing my uncertainty
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at the intersection, Gholly invites me to look more closely
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at the trees. An isolated broad leaved tree, he says,
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will nearly always have more branches and leaves on its
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south side. Trees are in the light harvesting business, and
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sunlight comes from the south in the northern hemisphere. He explains,
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Sure enough, looking at a birch tree and a clearing,
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I can see that one side, presumably the southern, has
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more growth than the other sides. Then he draws my
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attention to another clue. On the same tree, south facing
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branches grow directly toward the sunlight. He says, the branches
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on the north side can't do that because the rest
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of the tree is in the way, so they grow
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more vertically to harvest the light above them. My bearings
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click back into place. The longer, more horizontal branches point south,
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which means I must be looking east and the path
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turning left is going north to the land. Rover Gholey
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tamps down my enthusiasm. An isolated tree is pretty dependable,
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but you never put all your eggs in one basket.
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He says, you need seven or eight other signs to
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be sure. The brambles flanking the footpath, for example, on
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one side, the leaves have a red pigment because they
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are facing south and receiving more sunlight. On the other side,
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all the leaves are green. The earthen pathway holds another clue.
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Its northern side is drier and lighter in color, and
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its south side damper and darker. Gholey can even find
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signs in an old puddle. If you've got muddy opaque
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water at one end and pale green water at the
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other end, plant matter or algae has been blown there
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by the prevailing wind. In North America and Britain, the
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prevailing wind blows from the west or southwest. Having confirmed
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our directions, we walk on through the woods. He asks
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me what I see, and I list off birch trees, oaks, hazels,
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a mature beech tree, flowers with butterflies, rambles, patches of
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stinging nettles, cumulus clouds in the sky, two crows flying overhead.
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Gholey points out what I missed, many small birds partially
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hidden in foliage spider webs among the roots of the trees,
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but only on the east side, where they are sheltered
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from the prevailing westerly wind. He proceeds through fifty or
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sixty other directional clues that were completely invisib to me.
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If he is operating at close to one hundred percent
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sensory awareness. I'm in the five percent range. Because a
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song thrush has become accustomed to our presence and is
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singing unconcerned. Goolei concludes that we are the only people
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in this stretch of woods. Then another distant bird issues
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an alarm call, announcing some new and possibly dangerous intrusion
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into the woods, and the thrush falls silent. Someone's coming,
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Gooley says. A few minutes later, two hikers appear with
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the dog. Before the invention of compasses and sextants, the
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body of knowledge that Gholi has gathered into his nine
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books and taught in lectures and classes was essential to
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human survival and activity and widely familiar to people all
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over the planet today. If you have access to a
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cell phone and GPS, this knowledge is unnecessary, as people
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often point out to Gooleie. He counters that a knowledge
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of art, music, history, and literature is also unnecessary, but
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can greatly enrich one's life. That's what I'm really offering,
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he says. I've got nothing against technology. I think it's amazing.
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But if you leave your phone at home or in
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your pocket and start using some of these techniques, you
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will have a much richer experience outdoors, your senses will awaken,
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your brain will start solving puzzles, which is something the
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brain loves to do, and I can confirm that the
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trees and the woods will never look the same again.
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Gooley grew up in the south of England. He says
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he moved around a lot, especially after his parents divorced,
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and he never developed a real sense of home, often
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feeling insecure and unmoored. As a teenager, he began hurling
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himself into ambitious outdoor challenges. He learned how to sail,
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took flying lessons in the cockpit of a Piper Warrior
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PA twenty eight, trekked all over Britain, climbed Mount Kilimajaro,
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got horribly lost with the friend for three days on
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an active volcano in Indonesia, all by the time he
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turned twenty in nineteen ninety three. His father, a former
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special forces officer in the British Army, ran a travel
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company called Trail Finders, which made it relatively easy for
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Tristan to go where he wanted. He got his private
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pilot's license in his mid twenties and became even more mobile.
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One day, he called a friend and suggested that they
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fly a small plane from England into the Arctic Circle
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and back, a trip that pushed him to the very
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edge of his aviation comfort zone. With another friend, he
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sailed a boat, flew a plane and drove a four
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by four vehicle from England to the peak of Jebel Tubkal,
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the highest mountain in North Africa, all because he wanted
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to get there with the buying a commercial ticket. In
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nineteen ninety eight, he walked from Glasgow to London, relying
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only on a paper map, taking five weeks to cover
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more than three hundred and fifty miles. He funded his
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inventors by working intermittently for his father's company with stints
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as a bartender, a crew worker transporting yachts, and a
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financial speculator who did well betting against the dot com
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bubble in the late nineteen nineties. Restless is the word
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he uses to describe his younger self. He was also
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highly ambitious. He told himself that he needed to pick
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one of the things he loved, trekking, sailing or flying
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and make a career out of it. He asked himself
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which he loved the most, then realized he wasn't in
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love with any of them. Perplexed, he asked himself what
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these pursuits had in common. There were only a few things,
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and the biggest of all was navigation, he says, and
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the penny dropped. It was shaping journeys that I loved,
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whether using conventional or natural navigation. He would devote his
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life to wayfinding. At twenty five, he entered a long
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phase of hard study and practice, reading hundreds of books
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about exploration and navigation, taking courses, practicing skills, and passing
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some thirty examinations as a pilot and yachtsman. He had
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no specific career path in mind. I strongly believed that
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if I could develop a unique skill set, an income
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and career would follow, he says. The pinnacle of his
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ambition in his mid twenties was to fly solo and
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then sail single handed across the Atlantic and two separate trips.
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Only one person, the American tycoon adventurer Steve Fawcett, had
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successfully completed the solo double Transatlantic, as Gooli calls it.
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If Gholie could pull it off, it would trouve to
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himself and everyone else that he had reached the very
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highest level of skill, daring, and expertise. It wasn't until
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two thousand seven, however, by which time he was thirty four,
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that he had the money, qualifications, and experience to attempt
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the crossings, and by then he was married to his
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high school sweetheart Sophie, with a young child and a
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baby at home. Fawcett himself would die in a plane
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crash that same year, reinforcing the danger of Gooli's undertaking.
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There were only a few dozen pilots with the skill
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to take light aircraft on such extended legs. Goolie sought
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them out for advice. Of the seven he talked to,
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three had died in crashes by the time he was
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ready to fly at dawn on May twenty fourth, two
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thousand seven, wearing a rubber immersion suit and Casey crashed
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into the ocean. Gooli took off solo from Goose Bay, Labrador,
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in a single eng Cessna Caravan, an aircraft unfamiliar to
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him and in no way designed to be flown across
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the Atlantic. There are two ways to do it, he says,
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non stop, which involves putting a fairy tank of extra
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fuel in the back and flying in one long hop
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It sounds romantic, but from a navigational and challenge point
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of view, it's a dull way to do it. Your
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staring at engine dials for hours. I wanted to go
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with refueling stops in Greenland and Iceland, which is riskier
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but much more interesting for a navigator. The most poignant
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moment on the flight for Gholi was writing down the
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letters P N R and circling them after he'd pass
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the point of no return roughly half way between Goose
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Bay and Narsarswak and Greenland. However much he might want
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to turn back if the weather got hairy, he wouldn't
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make it because he'd run out of fuel and wind
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up in the sea. At one point, ice formed on
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the wings, forcing him to deploy his oxygen mask and
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to fly above the aircraft's legal limit in order to
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escape the icing conditions. Very scary times, he recalls. As
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he descended into Scottish airspace on the morning of the
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second day, he could hear through his headset above the
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din of the engine an ominous cracking sound. Is the
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whole air frame about to implode around me as the
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air pressure increases Because of some stupid oversight of mine,
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He recalls thinking the sound it turned out was the
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plastic bottle of urine next to him. He had half
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filled it at fifteen thousand feet, a challenging maneuver in
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a rubber immersion suit with no fly and five harness straps,
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and the bottle was now reacting to the descent into
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higher air pressure. After refueling in Scotland, Gooley made his
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final landing in Oxford, England. In December of that year,
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he attempted the Ocean crossing, departing the Marina in the
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Canary Island of Lanzarote and a thirty two foot long
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fiberglass monohull sailing yacht named GoldenEye that he'd bought for
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the voyage. The first two days were appalling. He had
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to thread the boat through the chain of the Canary
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Islands via busy shipping lanes, dodging large fishing vessels. Sudden
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accelerating winds rushed between the volcanic peaks of the Canary
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Islands and were impossible to anticipate at night. A storm
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off Madeira produced daunting twenty foot swells. Once he'd reached
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the middle of Atlantic, he went for ten days without seeing,
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hearing or sensing any evidence of human beings. It was
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physically relaxing but psychologically challenging. He says he was lonely
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with no stimuli to change his mood. It was sometimes tedious,
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and he was always uncomfortably hot. It was also an
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extended exercise in making important decisions while extremely sleep deprived.
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Except once when he missed his alarm and slept for
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an hour and a half, Gooley didn't sleep for more
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than thirty minutes at a stretch for the whole twenty
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six days. A romantic highlight was getting smacked in the
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face by flying fish while he watched dolphins ride his
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bow wave. He navigated by the sun, the wind, the
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ocean currents, and with the amazing stars at night, and
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he used navigational instruments to avoid collisions with other vessels.
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He felt a deep bond with his boat, but during
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serene moments, his mind erupted with a self lacerating question,
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what the hell are you doing out here with the
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six month old baby at home? Making landfall in Saint
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Lucia on New Year's Day two thousand eight, he met
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a glorious surprise. Sophie was there on a launch with
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baby Vincent, a four year old Ben, and other family members.
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The bay was full of tooting horns, crowds, dignitaries and
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TV cameras, and folks had brought champagne to toast him
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and a steel band to boot in a way. It
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was the grand finale to his life as an international adventurer,
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and he remains the only living person to have flown
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solo and sailed single handed across the Atlantic. In two
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thousand eight, Gooley decided to open a small school to
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teach the natural navigation techniques he had picked up and
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developed over the years. He budgeted approximately two thousand dollars
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of his savings, spent half of it getting a rudimentary
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website built and sent out press releases. I genuinely didn't
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think it could work, he says. At first he operated
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out of a shepherd's hut near his home in West Sussex.
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Then he was able to rent a heavily discounted room
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from the Royal Giuke Graphical Society, the London based organization
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that has promoted geographical knowledge since eighteen thirty. Gooley has
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been a fellow there for more than a decade. The
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teaching sessions were well attended by members of the public
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and journalists as well, first the newspapers, then radio and
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BBC television, and he's been busy ever since. Many of
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Gooley's students attest that his teaching has led them to
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deeper connection with nature, but in his sales pitch he
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steers well clear of anything spiritual, medicinal, or metaphysical. Rather,
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he emphasizes natural navigation is about exploration and simple fun.
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If someone said to me, go spend twenty minutes in
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a forest and just look at a tree, I'd be thinking,
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what is the effing point of that? My approach is
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to help people share the fun of dozens of many
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treasure hunts. I say, would you like to learn how
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to find your way using a butterfly? Or find north
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by looking at a tree leaf. In twenty ten, Gooley
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published his first book, The Natural Navigator. He was aware
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that the knowledge he had accumulated and the methods he
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had cultivated might vanish from the earth, and this was
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one impetus to write them down. He was also evolving
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from an adventurer into an educator and hoping that others
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would share his passion for the subject. The book unexpectedly
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sold out its first printing in Days, and raced through
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a second and third, attracting international attention. In all, his
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books have now sold one point five million copies and
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been published in twenty languages. How to Read Water Clues
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and Patterns From Puddles to the Sea twenty sixteen shares
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hundreds of techniques from Gholey's sailing voyages, his canoe trips
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to Borneo, and his time navigating the Gulf of Oman
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by starlight. The Secret World of Weather twenty twenty one,
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based on decades of study and observations and two years
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intensive research within Britain's meteorological community, helps readers make detailed,
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highly local weather forecasts by observing nature. Perching birds usually
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face into the wind because taking off is easier for
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them that way. If they turn around, a change in
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the weather is probably approaching. Gliding birds signal stable air
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and fair weather. Crickets chirp faster as the temperature rises,
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while snowflakes get smaller as the temperature drops. Gooley's new book,
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The Hidden Seasons distills new insights into a month by
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month guide to being more attentive to nature's signs. Gholi
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has settled into a comfortable rewarding career of teaching, lecturing,
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writing and researching while making ever more detailed observations of
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the natural landscape in West Sussex and other parts of Britain.
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In twenty twenty, the first year of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
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he won praise from the Royal Institute of Navigation for
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naming a previously uncategorized type of path, the smile path.
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Gholey describes it as a short, curved detour around an
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obstacle or problem, such as a muddy area or a
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fallen tree. During social distancing, he noticed people moved aside
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to give other walkers a wider birth, and curving spile
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shaped paths formed along the straighter established pathways in woods
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and parks. The Royal Institute invited the public to send
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images of smile paths, offering a year's free membership and
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six Gooli books for the most interesting ones. Confirmation bias
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is the constant enemy of the natural navigator. Humans tend
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to look for signs that support their current theory or
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hunch of direction and ignore those that contradict it, and
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nature's signs can be deceptive. Back in the woods of
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West Sussex, we come upon a large isolated beech tree,
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and Gooley asks me which direction we are facing. The
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tree has more growth on what I assume is its
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south side, but I'm one hundred and eighty degrees wrong.
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This tree has more branches and leaves on its north side.
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I'm willing to bet there was another large tree growing
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south of this one and blocking its light, Gooley says.
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Striding through the bracken and brambles, his pants tucked into
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his boots to protect against ticks, he finds a large
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stump to the beeches south. This departed tree inadvertently sculpted
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the shape of its living neighbor and was now feeding
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it by decaying into the earth. As a young man,
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Gooley would trek at a fast mark, covering at least
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fifteen miles a day, even in difficult mountainous terrain. These days,
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he's incapable of going on a family walk without getting
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left far behind. He is physically fit, but moves very
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slowly through the woods because he's forever stopping, examining, noticing
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new things, anomalies, asymmeteries, trying to solve the riddles that
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nature keeps setting in front of him. He maintains this
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extraordinary degree of awareness when he's in cities, paying close
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attention to cloud movements, moss and lichen growths on buildings,
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puddle reflections, the flows of pedestrian traffic at different times
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of day, Brick chimneys he's noticed tend to lean slightly
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north over time. TV satellites in the northeast United States
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generally point southwest, and the world's tennis courts are often
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aligned north to south to minimize the sun's glare. Over
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a late lunch of sandwiches, strawberries, and strong black coffee
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from a flask, I ask Gooley what to do if
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you get lost in the woods. The biggest challenge is psychological,
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because you panic and go into a mental tailspin. He says.
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The best thing to do is to touch a rock
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or a tree and focus on the temperature differences. The
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north side will be cooler, the south side warmer. Taking
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that one small action will tell your panic circuitry that
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it's not needed. He munches a strawberry and decides to
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refine his advice. In most situations, you stay put. It's
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harder to find people who walk in circles and lost
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people nearly always walk in circles next. Sea otters may
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be small marine mammals, but their effect on an ecosystem
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can be huge. Their fur is so soft it almost
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led to their extinction, but otter's recovery has been a
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boon to Pacific kelp forests, a key habitat for other
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sea life. By Alex Fox. Sea otters are North America's
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smallest marine mammal, weighing just thirty to one hundred pounds,
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but their appetites are huge. They burn calories at three
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times the rate expected for their size, chomping on clams, mussels,
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and sea urchins to compensate for a lack of blubber,
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the layer of fat mammals used to keep them warm.
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Because of their diets and appetites, otters exert a powerful
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influence on coastal ecosystems. In kelp forests, a key habitat
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for many fish, otters help prevent hungry urchins from creating
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desolate urchin barrens that support fewer species. In estuaries, otters
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feed heavily on crabs, allowing sea grass meadows to rebound,
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stabilizing salt marsh erosion and helping sequester carbon that would
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otherwise enter the atmosphere. Otters supercharged metabolism isn't the only
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adaptation that helps them survive in chilly waters. They also
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grow the densest fur in the animal kingdom, up to
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one million hairs per square inch. Ironically, their extraordinarily soft
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fur also nearly led to their extinction. From the mid
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seventeen hundred to nineteen eleven, when the Fur Sealed Treaty
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was signed, hunters reduced an estimated population of one hundred
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fifty thousand to three hundred thousand otters living along the
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North Pacific rim, which stretches from northern Japan to Baja California,
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to just one thousand to two thousand animals. The otters
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have since staged a comeback, bolstered by safety guards such
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as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and managed reintroductions to
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Southeast Alaska, Washington, and British Columbia in the nineteen sixties
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and seventies. Today they are scattered throughoutwaters from Russia to California,
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but the gaps are significant and their overall recovery has
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stalled at roughly fifty percent. To avoid stagnating further or
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even declining, sea otters must expand their range, but two
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marine predators present a challenge. Along the Aleutian Islands. In Alaska,
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killer whales caused a ninety percent population drop from the
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late nineteen eighties to two thousand five, and attacks by
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great white sharks are often fatal for sea otters. In California,
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the sharks rarely eat the otters, having realized upon tasting
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them that they lack calorie rich blubber, but not before
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that fatal bite elsewhere. The non profit National Fish and
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Wildlife Foundation recently awarded Oregon's Scilits tribes and its fellow
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Native American partners a one point five six million dollar
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grant to develop plans to reintroduce sea otters to parts
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of Oregon and northern California, where they have been missing
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from more than a century. Because otters may feast on local,
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profitable shellfish like dungeness crabs and sea urchins, the Ilaca Alliance,
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a sea otter advocacy group, is working with researchers such
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as marine biologist Tim Tinker of the University of California,
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Santa Cruz to model how reintroductions might affect these populations.
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The idea is to engage with fishers to identify locationations
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that can lessen economic impacts. Otters never have a small effect,
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Tinker says, to some those effects are positive, to others negative.
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People need to decide what kinds of ecosystems they want
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and accompanying this article fun fact what's the difference between
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sea otters and river otters. Sea otters support their ecosystems
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by preying on sea urchins, protecting keelp forests. River otters
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maintain the balance of their fresh water environments by dining
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on fish and other aquatic creatures. Both otter species have
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dense fur, but the fur of the river otter is
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thinner and more suitable for mobility on land. This concludes
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readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has
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been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have a
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great day.