Hello and welcome to the 58th issue of Place! Today we’re taking a closer look at the intricate connection between place and time, a relationship that is both natural and fraught with control. When navigating - whether at sea, in the case of co-editor Kylee’s flatmate Gum, or simply in life - could this be the key to experiencing place in a more multifaceted way?
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“Using dead reckoning,” Gum said standing in the doorway to the kitchen, “that’s how I prefer to sail.”
Gum is my 70-year-old roommate, retired jeweller, restorer, and one-time-sail-from Surrey-Quays-to-Greece Skipper. We’d just come back from visiting his boat in Suffolk, on the east coast of England (which to his dismay had, over the winter, become a nesting place for a family of Moorhens), and he was explaining why he hadn’t been out to sail as much as he wanted in the past few years.
“It’s hard to find a crew, to find people you can work together with like that.” Gum told me that it’s crucial to have clearly defined roles while sailing. If you’re crew, you need to be working under a Skipper you can trust and who’s methods you respect – if you’re a Skipper, you need to believe in the decisions you’re making, at the very least to convince the crew to listen to you. In sailing these rules apply at all times, even when the crew consists of just one person.
During the last sailing trip he went on in 2019, Gum had been crew, and didn’t have a very enjoyable time. For one thing, the Skipper didn’t have an ironed out schedule for who was supposed to be doing what, and for how long. That rubbed Gum the wrong way a bit. But mostly, it was the fact that the Skipper had solely relied on GPS for navigation. “He wasn’t paying close enough attention to the charts, to the currents,” Gum said, standing with his hand on the doorframe, tired from the long drive back to London and presumably, the memories of a frustrating trip.
“It’s not enough to look at the coastline, you need to know where you are when you sail. Of course GPS can do all that for you now, but where’s the fun in that? The thing I love most is doing it all the old way.”
In sailing speak, dead reckoning is the process by which one’s current and future position is determined based on calculations regarding speed, direction, and elapsed time. It is one of the oldest forms of marine navigation, and while it has been made largely obsolete by satellites, there are certain navigational systems that are still based on its principles.
A key element of marine dead reckoning, in addition to its mathematical backbone, is the incorporation of currents, wind, and other natural factors that can cause a vessel to drift, or impact an intended course. In this way a ship’s journey is defined by its environment – time and distance is referenced through place, whereby place itself becomes a timekeeper.
Experiencing time in reference to place is at the core of ancient navigational systems, and indeed, human existence before conventional timekeeping existed. In his book The Wayfinders, Wade Davis explores the traditional seafaring techniques of Polynesians, who, without written directions or compasses, navigated the sea based on only their senses and memory. Their memory was largely based on the timing of the environment around them. An excerpt from Davis’s book, chronicling a modern day excursion across the Pacific with a new generation of navigators reads:
Nainoa Thompson, an experienced Hawaiian navigator, and all of the experienced crew, Ka'iulani (Nainoa's protégé) could name and follow some 220 stars in the night sky. She knew and could track all the constellations, but for her the most important stars were those low in the sky, the ones that had just risen or were about to set. Nainoa explained: As the Earth rotates, every star comes up over the eastern horizon, describes an arc through the sky, and then sets on a westerly bearing. These two points on the horizon, where a specific star rises in the east and sets in the west, remain the same throughout the year, though the time at which a star emerges changes by four minutes every night. Thus, as long as one is able to commit to memory all the stars and their unique positions, the time at which each is to appear on a particular night, and their bearings as they break the horizon or slip beneath it, one can envision a 360-degree compass, which the Hawaiians divide conceptually into the 32 star houses, each a segment on the horizon named for a celestial body. Any one star is only dependable for a time, for as it arcs through the sky its bearings change. But by then there will be another star breaking the horizon, again on a bearing known to the navigator. Over the course of a night at sea - roughly 12 hours in the tropics - 10 such guiding stars are enough to maintain a course. To steer, the crew at the helm, instructed by the navigator, takes advantage of the canoe itself, positioning the vessel so that a particular star or celestial body remains framed, for example, within the angle subtended between the top of the mast and stays that support it. Any consistent point of reference will do.
There is a utility in measuring time in relation to place - quite obviously for a navigator at sea - but it’s also a way of ceding some false sense of control and de-centering oneself in the name of finding a truer path forward.
Indigenous scholar Mark Rifkin, writes in his book Beyond Settler Time, about the shortcomings of hegemonic Western timekeeping, its exclusivity but also, its potential impacts on our anxiety, on our favour of forward moving progress, and our inability to imagine time in a more multifaceted way:
Rather than approaching time as an abstract, homogenous measure of universal movement along a singular axis, we can think of it as plural, less as a temporality than temporalities. From this perspective, there is no singular unfolding of time, but, instead, varied temporal formations that have their own rhythms—patterns of consistency and transformation that emerge imminently out of the multifaceted and shifting sets of relationships that constitute those formations and out of the interactions among those formations.
And at a fundamental level, the way that we measure time today via clocks, is less about an accurate measurement of time passing but a way to splice up the rotations of the Earth so as to best serve production, erasing the idiosyncrasies of that which is closest to us, Joe Zadeh writes, in “The Tyranny of Time.”
“The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it…The Earth is not a perfect sphere with perfect movement; it’s a lumpy round mass that is squashed at both poles and wobbles. It does not rotate in exactly 24 hours each day or orbit the sun in exactly 365 days each year. It just kinda does. Perfection is a manmade concept; nature is irregular.”
“The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.”
We don’t connect to places only because of the length of time we have been present, but because of our navigation throughout them. The moment when a map turns into remembered steps, when a barren tree turns into a drooping lush canopy, when a neighborhood bar turns into a meeting place. And in this way there’s some power to be found in reconnecting to the dead reckoning - that which finds us where we are, along the path to where we are going.
Image credits: Pixabay, Rafael Cerqueira
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Join us next week for another journey.