Having recently read through two of Tristan Gooley’s “how to read” books—How to Read Nature and How to Read Water—I have spent the past couple of weeks in awe of how little I notice about the natural world around me. (A few months ago, after reading Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing, I felt similarly about literally everything around me.)
Gooley’s books are a bit slapdash in terms of construction—many, many comments seem just slightly out of place and the books never entirely come together. It also didn’t help things that my brain sometimes functions as an over-size children’s brain—meaning that I tend to append BUT WHY? to the end of every interesting factoid I come across—and that Gooley is often more interested in noticing a natural phenomenon and explaining the “surface why” as opposed to the deeper why—say, how light waves actually move through space rather than just that they do.
But at the same time, Gooley is writing with an understanding that many of us are starting from square one when it comes to “reading nature,” and—in How to Read Nature—sends us back out into the world with two clear imperatives. He asks us, whenever we are outdoors, to:
- Figure out what time it is (without using a clock or human cues)
- Figure out what direction
It turns out that even with Gooley’s clues, these directives are hard to abide by. For the first one, I often have a recent reference at hand, having, say, looked at my smartphone only an hour beforehand. It seems to me that camping or a really long hike is the right context to challenge myself with this directive…but with a young baby around, neither of those activities is exactly accessible at present.
The latter is far more achievable, but I’ve hand scant luck implementing it in the past several months. While I wish I could heft blame onto how overly ritualized my life has become—working from home, doing fewer activities than ever before—the truth is that for the directionally-challenged, life along the Front Range of Colorado is a godsend. Nearly any time you are outside in the Denver region, you can do a quick spin and locate the mountains to identify west.
When up in those same mountains? A far better opportunity…if only I could get away on more of those really long hikes…
Living in along the Front Range of Colorado makes the latter directive, in that it makes it too easy.
Taylor Coe 