10.30.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated November
twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio e is a
reading service intended for people who are blind or have
other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
Please join me now for the first article titled It's

(00:24):
almost impossible for Tristian Gholi to get lost. That's one
reason he has millions of followers. The British adventurer has
crossed the Atlantic solo and a plane and a boat.
Now he reads tree, leaves, puddles and moss to get
his bearings. By Richard Grant, I'm standing at an intersection

(00:45):
of footpaths in the woods of West Sussex, England, feeling
a little uncertain of my bearings. Which one of these
five paths leads back to the land rover parked I
think roughly north of here. The summer sun as high
and obscured by clouds, so not much help. The wind,
which has been blowing intermittently from the northeast all day,

(01:08):
providing a reliable navigation guide, has now died away completely,
and I have no phone, compass or GPS. Standing next
to me is Tristian Gulie, the Sherlock Homes of Nature,
as he's nicknamed in the British media. So I am
in no danger of actually getting lost. This tall, affable
bearded Englishman fifty two years old and wearing a canvas

(01:31):
bush hat, is one of the most skilled navigators on
the planet. He's a master yachtsman and pilot who has
risked his life on long solo adventures using conventional navigation instruments.
But his greatest expertise is in natural navigation, the ancient,
mostly lost art of finding direction by reading the signs

(01:53):
and clues in nature. He has studied the directional techniques
of the Tuareg, Bedwin, Dayak, and other indigenous peoples around
the Earth. He's tested Viking seafaring methods in a small
boat in the North Atlantic, and has written a series
of award winning and internationally best selling books about natural navigation, weather,

(02:16):
water and more. His latest out this fall, is The
Hidden Seasons, a calendar of Nature's clues. Observing my uncertainty
at the intersection, Gholly invites me to look more closely
at the trees. An isolated broad leaved tree, he says,
will nearly always have more branches and leaves on its

(02:38):
south side. Trees are in the light harvesting business, and
sunlight comes from the south in the northern hemisphere. He explains,
Sure enough, looking at a birch tree and a clearing,
I can see that one side, presumably the southern, has
more growth than the other sides. Then he draws my
attention to another clue. On the same tree, south facing

(03:01):
branches grow directly toward the sunlight. He says, the branches
on the north side can't do that because the rest
of the tree is in the way, so they grow
more vertically to harvest the light above them. My bearings
click back into place. The longer, more horizontal branches point south,
which means I must be looking east and the path

(03:22):
turning left is going north to the land. Rover Gholey
tamps down my enthusiasm. An isolated tree is pretty dependable,
but you never put all your eggs in one basket.
He says, you need seven or eight other signs to
be sure. The brambles flanking the footpath, for example, on
one side, the leaves have a red pigment because they

(03:45):
are facing south and receiving more sunlight. On the other side,
all the leaves are green. The earthen pathway holds another clue.
Its northern side is drier and lighter in color, and
its south side damper and darker. Gholey can even find
signs in an old puddle. If you've got muddy opaque

(04:05):
water at one end and pale green water at the
other end, plant matter or algae has been blown there
by the prevailing wind. In North America and Britain, the
prevailing wind blows from the west or southwest. Having confirmed
our directions, we walk on through the woods. He asks

(04:26):
me what I see, and I list off birch trees, oaks, hazels,
a mature beech tree, flowers with butterflies, rambles, patches of
stinging nettles, cumulus clouds in the sky, two crows flying overhead.
Gholey points out what I missed, many small birds partially
hidden in foliage spider webs among the roots of the trees,

(04:49):
but only on the east side, where they are sheltered
from the prevailing westerly wind. He proceeds through fifty or
sixty other directional clues that were completely invisib to me.
If he is operating at close to one hundred percent
sensory awareness. I'm in the five percent range. Because a
song thrush has become accustomed to our presence and is

(05:12):
singing unconcerned. Goolei concludes that we are the only people
in this stretch of woods. Then another distant bird issues
an alarm call, announcing some new and possibly dangerous intrusion
into the woods, and the thrush falls silent. Someone's coming,
Gooley says. A few minutes later, two hikers appear with

(05:34):
the dog. Before the invention of compasses and sextants, the
body of knowledge that Gholi has gathered into his nine
books and taught in lectures and classes was essential to
human survival and activity and widely familiar to people all
over the planet today. If you have access to a

(05:54):
cell phone and GPS, this knowledge is unnecessary, as people
often point out to Gooleie. He counters that a knowledge
of art, music, history, and literature is also unnecessary, but
can greatly enrich one's life. That's what I'm really offering,
he says. I've got nothing against technology. I think it's amazing.

(06:16):
But if you leave your phone at home or in
your pocket and start using some of these techniques, you
will have a much richer experience outdoors, your senses will awaken,
your brain will start solving puzzles, which is something the
brain loves to do, and I can confirm that the
trees and the woods will never look the same again.

(06:38):
Gooley grew up in the south of England. He says
he moved around a lot, especially after his parents divorced,
and he never developed a real sense of home, often
feeling insecure and unmoored. As a teenager, he began hurling
himself into ambitious outdoor challenges. He learned how to sail,
took flying lessons in the cockpit of a Piper Warrior

(07:02):
PA twenty eight, trekked all over Britain, climbed Mount Kilimajaro,
got horribly lost with the friend for three days on
an active volcano in Indonesia, all by the time he
turned twenty in nineteen ninety three. His father, a former
special forces officer in the British Army, ran a travel

(07:22):
company called Trail Finders, which made it relatively easy for
Tristan to go where he wanted. He got his private
pilot's license in his mid twenties and became even more mobile.
One day, he called a friend and suggested that they
fly a small plane from England into the Arctic Circle
and back, a trip that pushed him to the very

(07:44):
edge of his aviation comfort zone. With another friend, he
sailed a boat, flew a plane and drove a four
by four vehicle from England to the peak of Jebel Tubkal,
the highest mountain in North Africa, all because he wanted
to get there with the buying a commercial ticket. In
nineteen ninety eight, he walked from Glasgow to London, relying

(08:06):
only on a paper map, taking five weeks to cover
more than three hundred and fifty miles. He funded his
inventors by working intermittently for his father's company with stints
as a bartender, a crew worker transporting yachts, and a
financial speculator who did well betting against the dot com
bubble in the late nineteen nineties. Restless is the word

(08:30):
he uses to describe his younger self. He was also
highly ambitious. He told himself that he needed to pick
one of the things he loved, trekking, sailing or flying
and make a career out of it. He asked himself
which he loved the most, then realized he wasn't in
love with any of them. Perplexed, he asked himself what

(08:51):
these pursuits had in common. There were only a few things,
and the biggest of all was navigation, he says, and
the penny dropped. It was shaping journeys that I loved,
whether using conventional or natural navigation. He would devote his
life to wayfinding. At twenty five, he entered a long

(09:12):
phase of hard study and practice, reading hundreds of books
about exploration and navigation, taking courses, practicing skills, and passing
some thirty examinations as a pilot and yachtsman. He had
no specific career path in mind. I strongly believed that
if I could develop a unique skill set, an income

(09:34):
and career would follow, he says. The pinnacle of his
ambition in his mid twenties was to fly solo and
then sail single handed across the Atlantic and two separate trips.
Only one person, the American tycoon adventurer Steve Fawcett, had
successfully completed the solo double Transatlantic, as Gooli calls it.

(09:57):
If Gholie could pull it off, it would trouve to
himself and everyone else that he had reached the very
highest level of skill, daring, and expertise. It wasn't until
two thousand seven, however, by which time he was thirty four,
that he had the money, qualifications, and experience to attempt
the crossings, and by then he was married to his

(10:19):
high school sweetheart Sophie, with a young child and a
baby at home. Fawcett himself would die in a plane
crash that same year, reinforcing the danger of Gooli's undertaking.
There were only a few dozen pilots with the skill
to take light aircraft on such extended legs. Goolie sought

(10:39):
them out for advice. Of the seven he talked to,
three had died in crashes by the time he was
ready to fly at dawn on May twenty fourth, two
thousand seven, wearing a rubber immersion suit and Casey crashed
into the ocean. Gooli took off solo from Goose Bay, Labrador,
in a single eng Cessna Caravan, an aircraft unfamiliar to

(11:03):
him and in no way designed to be flown across
the Atlantic. There are two ways to do it, he says,
non stop, which involves putting a fairy tank of extra
fuel in the back and flying in one long hop
It sounds romantic, but from a navigational and challenge point
of view, it's a dull way to do it. Your
staring at engine dials for hours. I wanted to go

(11:26):
with refueling stops in Greenland and Iceland, which is riskier
but much more interesting for a navigator. The most poignant
moment on the flight for Gholi was writing down the
letters P N R and circling them after he'd pass
the point of no return roughly half way between Goose
Bay and Narsarswak and Greenland. However much he might want

(11:50):
to turn back if the weather got hairy, he wouldn't
make it because he'd run out of fuel and wind
up in the sea. At one point, ice formed on
the wings, forcing him to deploy his oxygen mask and
to fly above the aircraft's legal limit in order to
escape the icing conditions. Very scary times, he recalls. As

(12:13):
he descended into Scottish airspace on the morning of the
second day, he could hear through his headset above the
din of the engine an ominous cracking sound. Is the
whole air frame about to implode around me as the
air pressure increases Because of some stupid oversight of mine,
He recalls thinking the sound it turned out was the

(12:34):
plastic bottle of urine next to him. He had half
filled it at fifteen thousand feet, a challenging maneuver in
a rubber immersion suit with no fly and five harness straps,
and the bottle was now reacting to the descent into
higher air pressure. After refueling in Scotland, Gooley made his
final landing in Oxford, England. In December of that year,

(12:59):
he attempted the Ocean crossing, departing the Marina in the
Canary Island of Lanzarote and a thirty two foot long
fiberglass monohull sailing yacht named GoldenEye that he'd bought for
the voyage. The first two days were appalling. He had
to thread the boat through the chain of the Canary
Islands via busy shipping lanes, dodging large fishing vessels. Sudden

(13:24):
accelerating winds rushed between the volcanic peaks of the Canary
Islands and were impossible to anticipate at night. A storm
off Madeira produced daunting twenty foot swells. Once he'd reached
the middle of Atlantic, he went for ten days without seeing,
hearing or sensing any evidence of human beings. It was

(13:47):
physically relaxing but psychologically challenging. He says he was lonely
with no stimuli to change his mood. It was sometimes tedious,
and he was always uncomfortably hot. It was also an
extended exercise in making important decisions while extremely sleep deprived.
Except once when he missed his alarm and slept for

(14:09):
an hour and a half, Gooley didn't sleep for more
than thirty minutes at a stretch for the whole twenty
six days. A romantic highlight was getting smacked in the
face by flying fish while he watched dolphins ride his
bow wave. He navigated by the sun, the wind, the
ocean currents, and with the amazing stars at night, and

(14:31):
he used navigational instruments to avoid collisions with other vessels.
He felt a deep bond with his boat, but during
serene moments, his mind erupted with a self lacerating question,
what the hell are you doing out here with the
six month old baby at home? Making landfall in Saint
Lucia on New Year's Day two thousand eight, he met

(14:55):
a glorious surprise. Sophie was there on a launch with
baby Vincent, a four year old Ben, and other family members.
The bay was full of tooting horns, crowds, dignitaries and
TV cameras, and folks had brought champagne to toast him
and a steel band to boot in a way. It
was the grand finale to his life as an international adventurer,

(15:19):
and he remains the only living person to have flown
solo and sailed single handed across the Atlantic. In two
thousand eight, Gooley decided to open a small school to
teach the natural navigation techniques he had picked up and
developed over the years. He budgeted approximately two thousand dollars
of his savings, spent half of it getting a rudimentary

(15:42):
website built and sent out press releases. I genuinely didn't
think it could work, he says. At first he operated
out of a shepherd's hut near his home in West Sussex.
Then he was able to rent a heavily discounted room
from the Royal Giuke Graphical Society, the London based organization

(16:03):
that has promoted geographical knowledge since eighteen thirty. Gooley has
been a fellow there for more than a decade. The
teaching sessions were well attended by members of the public
and journalists as well, first the newspapers, then radio and
BBC television, and he's been busy ever since. Many of

(16:24):
Gooley's students attest that his teaching has led them to
deeper connection with nature, but in his sales pitch he
steers well clear of anything spiritual, medicinal, or metaphysical. Rather,
he emphasizes natural navigation is about exploration and simple fun.
If someone said to me, go spend twenty minutes in

(16:46):
a forest and just look at a tree, I'd be thinking,
what is the effing point of that? My approach is
to help people share the fun of dozens of many
treasure hunts. I say, would you like to learn how
to find your way using a butterfly? Or find north
by looking at a tree leaf. In twenty ten, Gooley

(17:08):
published his first book, The Natural Navigator. He was aware
that the knowledge he had accumulated and the methods he
had cultivated might vanish from the earth, and this was
one impetus to write them down. He was also evolving
from an adventurer into an educator and hoping that others
would share his passion for the subject. The book unexpectedly

(17:32):
sold out its first printing in Days, and raced through
a second and third, attracting international attention. In all, his
books have now sold one point five million copies and
been published in twenty languages. How to Read Water Clues
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
to Borneo, and his time navigating the Gulf of Oman
by starlight. The Secret World of Weather twenty twenty one,
based on decades of study and observations and two years
intensive research within Britain's meteorological community, helps readers make detailed,

(18:16):
highly local weather forecasts by observing nature. Perching birds usually
face into the wind because taking off is easier for
them that way. If they turn around, a change in
the weather is probably approaching. Gliding birds signal stable air
and fair weather. Crickets chirp faster as the temperature rises,

(18:38):
while snowflakes get smaller as the temperature drops. Gooley's new book,
The Hidden Seasons distills new insights into a month by
month guide to being more attentive to nature's signs. Gholi
has settled into a comfortable rewarding career of teaching, lecturing,
writing and researching while making ever more detailed observations of

(19:02):
the natural landscape in West Sussex and other parts of Britain.
In twenty twenty, the first year of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
he won praise from the Royal Institute of Navigation for
naming a previously uncategorized type of path, the smile path.
Gholey describes it as a short, curved detour around an

(19:23):
obstacle or problem, such as a muddy area or a
fallen tree. During social distancing, he noticed people moved aside
to give other walkers a wider birth, and curving spile
shaped paths formed along the straighter established pathways in woods
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
six Gooli books for the most interesting ones. Confirmation bias
is the constant enemy of the natural navigator. Humans tend
to look for signs that support their current theory or
hunch of direction and ignore those that contradict it, and

(20:07):
nature's signs can be deceptive. Back in the woods of
West Sussex, we come upon a large isolated beech tree,
and Gooley asks me which direction we are facing. The
tree has more growth on what I assume is its
south side, but I'm one hundred and eighty degrees wrong.
This tree has more branches and leaves on its north side.

(20:30):
I'm willing to bet there was another large tree growing
south of this one and blocking its light, Gooley says.
Striding through the bracken and brambles, his pants tucked into
his boots to protect against ticks, he finds a large
stump to the beeches south. This departed tree inadvertently sculpted
the shape of its living neighbor and was now feeding

(20:53):
it by decaying into the earth. As a young man,
Gooley would trek at a fast mark, covering at least
fifteen miles a day, even in difficult mountainous terrain. These days,
he's incapable of going on a family walk without getting
left far behind. He is physically fit, but moves very

(21:15):
slowly through the woods because he's forever stopping, examining, noticing
new things, anomalies, asymmeteries, trying to solve the riddles that
nature keeps setting in front of him. He maintains this
extraordinary degree of awareness when he's in cities, paying close
attention to cloud movements, moss and lichen growths on buildings,

(21:39):
puddle reflections, the flows of pedestrian traffic at different times
of day, Brick chimneys he's noticed tend to lean slightly
north over time. TV satellites in the northeast United States
generally point southwest, and the world's tennis courts are often
aligned north to south to minimize the sun's glare. Over

(22:03):
a late lunch of sandwiches, strawberries, and strong black coffee
from a flask, I ask Gooley what to do if
you get lost in the woods. The biggest challenge is psychological,
because you panic and go into a mental tailspin. He says.
The best thing to do is to touch a rock
or a tree and focus on the temperature differences. The

(22:26):
north side will be cooler, the south side warmer. Taking
that one small action will tell your panic circuitry that
it's not needed. He munches a strawberry and decides to
refine his advice. In most situations, you stay put. It's
harder to find people who walk in circles and lost

(22:47):
people nearly always walk in circles next. Sea otters may
be small marine mammals, but their effect on an ecosystem
can be huge. Their fur is so soft it almost
led to their extinction, but otter's recovery has been a
boon to Pacific kelp forests, a key habitat for other

(23:10):
sea life. By Alex Fox. Sea otters are North America's
smallest marine mammal, weighing just thirty to one hundred pounds,
but their appetites are huge. They burn calories at three
times the rate expected for their size, chomping on clams, mussels,
and sea urchins to compensate for a lack of blubber,

(23:33):
the layer of fat mammals used to keep them warm.
Because of their diets and appetites, otters exert a powerful
influence on coastal ecosystems. In kelp forests, a key habitat
for many fish, otters help prevent hungry urchins from creating
desolate urchin barrens that support fewer species. In estuaries, otters

(23:57):
feed heavily on crabs, allowing sea grass meadows to rebound,
stabilizing salt marsh erosion and helping sequester carbon that would
otherwise enter the atmosphere. Otters supercharged metabolism isn't the only
adaptation that helps them survive in chilly waters. They also

(24:18):
grow the densest fur in the animal kingdom, up to
one million hairs per square inch. Ironically, their extraordinarily soft
fur also nearly led to their extinction. From the mid
seventeen hundred to nineteen eleven, when the Fur Sealed Treaty
was signed, hunters reduced an estimated population of one hundred

(24:41):
fifty thousand to three hundred thousand otters living along the
North Pacific rim, which stretches from northern Japan to Baja California,
to just one thousand to two thousand animals. The otters
have since staged a comeback, bolstered by safety guards such
as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and managed reintroductions to

(25:06):
Southeast Alaska, Washington, and British Columbia in the nineteen sixties
and seventies. Today they are scattered throughoutwaters from Russia to California,
but the gaps are significant and their overall recovery has
stalled at roughly fifty percent. To avoid stagnating further or

(25:28):
even declining, sea otters must expand their range, but two
marine predators present a challenge. Along the Aleutian Islands. In Alaska,
killer whales caused a ninety percent population drop from the
late nineteen eighties to two thousand five, and attacks by

(25:50):
great white sharks are often fatal for sea otters. In California,
the sharks rarely eat the otters, having realized upon tasting
them that they lack calorie rich blubber, but not before
that fatal bite elsewhere. The non profit National Fish and
Wildlife Foundation recently awarded Oregon's Scilits tribes and its fellow

(26:15):
Native American partners a one point five six million dollar
grant to develop plans to reintroduce sea otters to parts
of Oregon and northern California, where they have been missing
from more than a century. Because otters may feast on local,
profitable shellfish like dungeness crabs and sea urchins, the Ilaca Alliance,

(26:40):
a sea otter advocacy group, is working with researchers such
as marine biologist Tim Tinker of the University of California,
Santa Cruz to model how reintroductions might affect these populations.
The idea is to engage with fishers to identify locationations

(27:00):
that can lessen economic impacts. Otters never have a small effect,
Tinker says, to some those effects are positive, to others negative.
People need to decide what kinds of ecosystems they want
and accompanying this article fun fact what's the difference between

(27:22):
sea otters and river otters. Sea otters support their ecosystems
by preying on sea urchins, protecting keelp forests. River otters
maintain the balance of their fresh water environments by dining
on fish and other aquatic creatures. Both otter species have

(27:42):
dense fur, but the fur of the river otter is
thinner and more suitable for mobility on land. This concludes
readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has
been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have a
great day.