see

“See?” I said, “first the street opens up at the Kolk, then there’s this stretch with the perfume shop in the middle of it and then the chinese restaurants start, and Latei is on the right of the fish place, across the street from us.” With A. I talked about how submarines navigate. “Well, they use inertial navigation because submarines can’t see” Something I surprised myself with, because I remember how my brother explained inertial navigation to me, and I had stored that somewhere, for it to pop up in my mind now. I explained to A. how I need to position my body in space so that I can deduct the direction I’m facing after I’ve established four right-angle turns: compass points, east north south west. My navigation has become more competent, but I do research routes more before I walk them. And it has become second nature in many ways to execute every element of what is a navigational procedure, in sequence, just like INS. Waypoints. The first lesson I received in their use was when I had to find the supermarket that was one block away from us: “walk along where you hear that there is a gallery: a roof over you and to the left dead sound. Then where it opens up there’s the car park to your left, where you’ll hear cars revving up to go up the slope. So then, after you’ve crossed, there is a building with a glassy sound on your left and there’s cars backing into parking bays to your left. There’s one deep entrance to your left, then another one and there’s the entrance to the supermarket where there is a rubber mat outside and two trash cans on the left, fairly close to the wall and blocking your way. I vocalize sequences often, silently, to make sure I get the sequence right. “Oh, songlines!”, I. said, immediately, when I described to her how this worked, how I had found VBK at all, which was somewhat of a mystery to them. When I walk with someone who’s sighted, I need to tell them to let me be, because my routes are often different from how they walk them. I walk from waypoint to waypoint. As we talked, I. referred to how illiterate people use the highway. Apparently, in much the same way: moving in sequence from one waypoint to another. Only yesterday did it come to me how there was a richness to this. Many details all linked like beads on a string from where I was to where I want to be.