BY HARRY WEEKES
I have been feeling a little lost lately. I pay enough attention to the scientific news to know that there isn’t much good, and even a moderate dive into the state of humans on the planet can leave me disoriented and grumpy.
And so it was that by some peculiar alignment of irony, existential angst, and hope, I found myself in Hawaii in the beginning of November, listening to Nainoa Thompson, the president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, talk about the near-extinction, preservation, and resurrection of Polynesian Voyaging.
The short version of this ancient story goes like this. In the early 1970s, wayfinding, the craft of sailing around the Pacific in a canoe, came down to one person, Mau Piailug, an aging Micronesian navigator. Part of learning any craft is the obligation of teaching it to others. For the next 40 years, Mau shared his understanding of the stars, and the tides, and the currents, and how to “pull islands from the ocean.” One of his students was Nainoa Thompson.
Listening to Nainoa is to realize there are vastly different ways of knowing the world, and one’s own is but a sliver of the biodiversity of thoughts in the cognitive universe. Trying to understand how a person navigates crew and canoe to any island in the Pacific, much less as a routine way of living, would be unfathomable except when the person describing it is actively doing it.
From where I was staying to where I heard Nainoa was a 20-minute walk that took me more than an hour. Watching green sea turtles eat algae and attempting to sort out a new suite of birds tends to take a while. One bird stood out—the Pacific golden plover. Wearing its winter coat—a tremendous mottled pattern of browns, yellows, white and gold—the bird was preening at the edge of the ocean.
Pacific golden plovers weigh less than 7 ounces and come in around 10 inches long. In other words, they are about the size of a big bratwurst. They range, as their name suggests, over the Pacific… and beyond. They winter on “tiny islands… a feat which requires precise navigation.”
Utterly astonished by stories of humans able to navigate the Pacific, here is a bird, whose brain is smaller than a cashew, that does this routinely, and has for millennia. As incomprehensible as wayfinding is in humans, imagining how a bird does this is downright alien. And there is no part of standard biological responses that helps. “It’s instinct.” “It’s learned.” “It’s a combination of an internal magnetic compass and being taught by their parents.”
Our worldviews reflect our upbringing and the culture in which we live. In many ways, mine has been a culture of surety and certainty and a faith that we can know things, even that knowledge itself is measurable, and that the quality of these measurements is the very basis of their acceptability.
Fortunately, I am reminded, often, that this is but one worldview. The worldview that says you need a chronometer, specific and detailed maps, and GPS to make it to the supermarket is one way of knowing. The one that enables a canoe and crew to paddle from Hawaii to Tahiti, based on the sun, the stars, and the currents, is another.
Increasingly, I find points of hope in these other ways of understanding, and great solace in knowing that in them is a potential different course, an alternative for how we might approach people living on the planet. And knowing that at some point, a wayfinder looked for plovers, flying their ancient course to distant islands, another small being doing its best to survive on the planet, well, that’s an antidote to grumpiness every day.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 47th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with his wife Hilary and their three kids—Georgia, Penelope and Simon—a nice little flock.
