summer 2006 r.kv.r.y non-fiction
Shooting Azimuths page 3
Three weeks: twenty-one days. Hadn’t I read somewhere it took
just twenty-one days to establish a habit. Or, had that been to
break one? “I really need to stay for this extra navigation training.”
“You’re becoming impossible!”
I gave the phone cord a final tug. “Didn’t you fail the night compass
march?”
At two a.m. Easter Sunday, the day before the night compass
march, I heard a knock. From my bunk to the door, I dragged the
dream of the day’s two-hour practice march over brown hills–the
smell of cold, lifeless trees still in my hair–and the memory of
counting and recounting my steps, of refiguring grid north from
geographic north from magnetic north in an effort to find true north.
I opened the door and he was there: in his arms our sleeping
toddler with a blush of the pox on her chin, shoeless, lost in her
own dreams, wearing the new Easter dress. Rumpled.
2. True North
For the night compass march, you set off on foot at nightfall, and at
first everything seems almost pleasant. You’re bundled in a heavy
field jacket over your cammies, you’re wearing boots, and around
your waist, a belt with a canteen of water. You have a flashlight
and a compass with a red needle that points toward magnetic north
regardless of the direction you turn your body. The trick is in
remembering to turn your body and compass as one.
Forty, forty-one, forty-two…sixty-five steps per hundred meters, and
you’re mentally tracking the meters and the steps across dark dry
acres and up and over small hills. You could get used to this, this
thrill of independence that is feeding your spirit, of self-reliance; for
the first time you know where you are and where you need to go.
After a while, you start wondering how everyone else is getting
along. You shine the flashlight on your wristwatch; nearly an hour
has passed since you last heard another Marine…and now you are
beginning to slow down. You fix in your mind the step count, so you
can stop, have a look around without losing your place. You check
left and listen. Nothing. No crickets, no frogs, no birds. You check
right. Nothing but the noise in your head and the roar of silence in
your ears.
You think, What are the odds I’m the only one in more than two
hundred to have drawn these coordinates? And then it happens.
That sliding silver pinball that rolls and rolls around in your brain
until it drops like cold metal into your heart: you’re lost. Or maybe,
just maybe, you’re the only one on the true trail. That’s it, you say.
You’re right, for after all, hadn’t you made it through the dark forest
last week? In the classroom, hadn’t you correctly plotted every
coordinate? You refer to your map for the elevation, searching on
paper for the depression you’re standing in. You walk on. Up and
over another hill toward the sound of rapids. The river. And so you
must be right.
The icy water swirls around your ankles and you trudge on to the
knees, to the hips, to the waist, holding your ground, stopping to
check your compass, remembering when you learned to cross a
river two years earlier at mountain warfare training in northern
California how easy it is to be swept away or pulled off course, and
so you adjust, lift a foot, place it down, slide another along the
unsettled bottom until the river around you sinks from your waist to
hips, to knees, to ankles.
Downstream, the crash of limbs: Goddam beavers! You shout into
the cavern of darkness toward the voice, Everything okay? A
reluctant, Yeah! sends you back on course.
A half hour later, your toes are stumping against asphalt.
Something’s wrong here, you think, and you pull out the map, click
on the flashlight. Look up. You’ve learned true north can be found
by locating the moon and its angle to the North Star. But there’s no
moon, remember? But neither is there supposed to be a road here
under your feet. What you want to think is, Who put this Goddam
road here? What you’re really thinking is, Who forgot to put this
road on the Goddam map? Because what you don’t want to think is,
How the hell did I wander so far off course I found a road not on
the Goddam map? And you’re wondering if you’re even on the
fucking base anymore. And where the hell is everybody? And how
long will they wait before sending out a search party. And how if
you’d been able to eat more for dinner than a package of peanut
butter crackers–only a sadistic idiot orders a weigh-in after chow–
you would be thinking more clearly. And you’ve decided that when
you get back to the barracks, if you get back, you’re going to order
a large pepperoni pizza with double cheese from that place that
delivers on base until midnight.
just twenty-one days to establish a habit. Or, had that been to
break one? “I really need to stay for this extra navigation training.”
“You’re becoming impossible!”
I gave the phone cord a final tug. “Didn’t you fail the night compass
march?”
At two a.m. Easter Sunday, the day before the night compass
march, I heard a knock. From my bunk to the door, I dragged the
dream of the day’s two-hour practice march over brown hills–the
smell of cold, lifeless trees still in my hair–and the memory of
counting and recounting my steps, of refiguring grid north from
geographic north from magnetic north in an effort to find true north.
I opened the door and he was there: in his arms our sleeping
toddler with a blush of the pox on her chin, shoeless, lost in her
own dreams, wearing the new Easter dress. Rumpled.
2. True North
For the night compass march, you set off on foot at nightfall, and at
first everything seems almost pleasant. You’re bundled in a heavy
field jacket over your cammies, you’re wearing boots, and around
your waist, a belt with a canteen of water. You have a flashlight
and a compass with a red needle that points toward magnetic north
regardless of the direction you turn your body. The trick is in
remembering to turn your body and compass as one.
Forty, forty-one, forty-two…sixty-five steps per hundred meters, and
you’re mentally tracking the meters and the steps across dark dry
acres and up and over small hills. You could get used to this, this
thrill of independence that is feeding your spirit, of self-reliance; for
the first time you know where you are and where you need to go.
After a while, you start wondering how everyone else is getting
along. You shine the flashlight on your wristwatch; nearly an hour
has passed since you last heard another Marine…and now you are
beginning to slow down. You fix in your mind the step count, so you
can stop, have a look around without losing your place. You check
left and listen. Nothing. No crickets, no frogs, no birds. You check
right. Nothing but the noise in your head and the roar of silence in
your ears.
You think, What are the odds I’m the only one in more than two
hundred to have drawn these coordinates? And then it happens.
That sliding silver pinball that rolls and rolls around in your brain
until it drops like cold metal into your heart: you’re lost. Or maybe,
just maybe, you’re the only one on the true trail. That’s it, you say.
You’re right, for after all, hadn’t you made it through the dark forest
last week? In the classroom, hadn’t you correctly plotted every
coordinate? You refer to your map for the elevation, searching on
paper for the depression you’re standing in. You walk on. Up and
over another hill toward the sound of rapids. The river. And so you
must be right.
The icy water swirls around your ankles and you trudge on to the
knees, to the hips, to the waist, holding your ground, stopping to
check your compass, remembering when you learned to cross a
river two years earlier at mountain warfare training in northern
California how easy it is to be swept away or pulled off course, and
so you adjust, lift a foot, place it down, slide another along the
unsettled bottom until the river around you sinks from your waist to
hips, to knees, to ankles.
Downstream, the crash of limbs: Goddam beavers! You shout into
the cavern of darkness toward the voice, Everything okay? A
reluctant, Yeah! sends you back on course.
A half hour later, your toes are stumping against asphalt.
Something’s wrong here, you think, and you pull out the map, click
on the flashlight. Look up. You’ve learned true north can be found
by locating the moon and its angle to the North Star. But there’s no
moon, remember? But neither is there supposed to be a road here
under your feet. What you want to think is, Who put this Goddam
road here? What you’re really thinking is, Who forgot to put this
road on the Goddam map? Because what you don’t want to think is,
How the hell did I wander so far off course I found a road not on
the Goddam map? And you’re wondering if you’re even on the
fucking base anymore. And where the hell is everybody? And how
long will they wait before sending out a search party. And how if
you’d been able to eat more for dinner than a package of peanut
butter crackers–only a sadistic idiot orders a weigh-in after chow–
you would be thinking more clearly. And you’ve decided that when
you get back to the barracks, if you get back, you’re going to order
a large pepperoni pizza with double cheese from that place that
delivers on base until midnight.
