INS: inertial nav system.
So is this supposed to be an improvement on the Sperry Mark XIV mod 1 that I first used? (Circ. 1944)
Oh!
I can do this one!
I was very good at Orienteering!
Let’s see if I can describe orienteering.
Well, you have a map.
A map is a two dimensional representation of.....it’s a piece of paper with squiggly lines and colors on it. You mostly use it to keep the rain off your head because it always rains when you go orienteering.
Now, you also have a compass. Not a geometry compass, but a compass with a needle and all the points. Let’s see there’s East and West and up and down or something like that.
The really professional orienteerers or staggering drunks as they’re sometimes called, use a lensatic compass. This is a compass with a little flip up dohicky that is used for.....well I don’t know what you could possibly use it for. Maybe to flip the top on a beer can.
Us regular orienteerers or cheapskates as we’re commonly called, use a clear plastic compass that you can put on the map if it’s not too soggy and see all the colors.
Charles Stark Draper would have loved this.
Nothing’s quieter than Library light.
“Our approach uses this process of light-matter interaction in which the light actually produces sound, or acoustic, waves inside a material”
hmmm. sounds sort of like a photon cavitron ...
All the colors on the map stand for something.
Blue, of course, stands for water.
Green stands for vegetation.
Yellow stands for you dripped some mustard from your ham sammich on the map.
Puce stands for gay bars. You wouldn’t think there would be a lot of gay bars out in the woods, but evidently, homosexuals are hikers.
One of the first things you have to do is orientate your map. You ask the map if it’s a boy map or a girl map or a gazetteer or something.
You have to use the declination diagram that is on the map.
It turns out that North isn’t really North. Sometimes East is North. It has something to do with the North Pole. Rudolph screws up compasses or something.
Anyway, you have to know the declination in degrees. Sometimes it’s a bachelors degree and sometimes it’s a masters degree.
Just kidding.
You have to be able to convert Fahrenheit degrees to Celsius degrees.
Most of the time, you just add five degrees to whatever bearing you have to go on.
Ping for your input.
So, you figure out your bearing, and then you grease it.
There’s a lot of bearing greasing going on where the puce is on the map.
Aha!
But you are walking and you have to figure out how many steps you need to take to get to your first point. That’s why you have already figured out your Step Count.
A Step Count is how many steps you take to go 100 meters. You lay out a 100 meter tape and then walk beside it and count your steps.
But steps can be tricky things. You probably have to step over fallen trees and moose crap and homosexuals greasing their bearings.
So you have to have an Adjusted Pace Count. Hopefully it’s a well adjusted pace count and doesn’t need therapy.
Now you have your bearing and you know how many steps to take!
You’re ready to go......have a drink from the old wineskin.
There’s lots of drinking from the old wineskin in orienteering.
I used to carry four or five wineskins.
After a while, you learn that the real fun in orienteering is not galloping through the bushes looking for some pole or Italian, but hitting the old wineskin.
I don’t think I ever found a single point.
I would drink four or five wineskins of wine and sit down on a stump and start singing Muskrat Love or some other hiking song and wait for the helicopter to find me.
But, alas, orienteering has fallen on hard times.
Where before, millions of orienteerers were tramping through the woods singing Muskrat Love, you can now barely find a half dozen tramps in the woods. But I keep searching.
I blame this falloff of orienteering on, you guessed it, PMS....Global Positioning System.
Now, you just ask your car where to go and it tells you how to get there. And it doesn’t swear near as much as my Dad did when I was driving with him.
“How the hell would I know where the museum is? Have you got another wineskin?”
This is why I strongly urge everyone to turn off their PMS systems and go into the woods looking for tramps. And I don’t mean hobos!
Since I always had to have the helicopter rescue me, I became friends with a few helicopter pilots.
I asked them how they navigate.
“You just have to get up high enough to see the Pacific Ocean. If I can see the Pacific Ocean, I can find my way anywhere.”
I asked them what they did at night.
“Oh, we don’t actually fly at night. We turn on the engine and let those flat things whirl around a bit, but we don’t actually take off in the dark.”