OBJECTIVE OF THE DAYBuild an instrument at your bench, drive out to dark ground before last light, and take your bearings the old way: find true north by the stars and measure, to the degree, how far north on the Earth you stand.
Friend,
You’ll forgive the paper. I prefer a letter to a notification; a letter waits for you.
Once a month I’m going to send you out. Not on a chore. On an outing, in the old sense: a short trip with a purpose, from which you come home carrying something. Set up, gather your gear, hit the objective, home by supper — and back to ordinary life with your head a little clearer.
This month the purpose is easy to say and very old to do. You’ll build a sighting instrument out of a cereal box and a drinking straw, carry it somewhere properly dark, and find out exactly where you are standing on the planet. Nobody will tell you the answer. You’ll take it yourself, the way it was taken for three thousand years before anybody had a phone to ask.
And because no outing should be all business, I’ve enclosed a page from someone who did this for a living.
Before any shoot, any survey, any outing worth the name: lay it all out on the table and check it twice. Half of this is for the bench tonight; half rides in the truck.
Every star wheels around one point in the northern sky, once a day. Polaris sits within a degree of it. Face it and you face true north: no compass, no battery, no signal. Measure how high it hangs above the horizon and that angle is your latitude. Sailors bet their lives on this. You’re only betting an evening.
Find the Big Dipper. The two stars at the lip of its bowl — Merak, then Dubhe — point at Polaris. Go about five times their gap.
At arm’s length: a fist is about 10°, three fingers about 5°, a little finger about 1°. The quadrant does the fine work; your hand checks it.
Polaris is true north, and its altitude ≈ your latitude. Each degree is about 69 miles. Within one degree, you’ve done what navigators did.
Practice here before you go. Tilt the quadrant until the star sits dead-centre in your straw, then pinch the thread against the card and read where it crosses the scale, the way you will tonight by red light with cold fingers.
This part can’t be done on a screen, and that’s the point. Bring a friend if you like; this one is better with two.
Hunting seasons may be open where you’re going. Wear blaze orange when sharing ground with hunters, stay on roads and trails after dark, and follow every posted rule, hour and sign-in requirement for the area. Carry water, a warm layer, a charged phone and a headlamp. Leave no trace; take every scrap of tape and paper home. This outing involves no firearms, but if you carry one, follow your state’s laws and regulations. Possibles is education and recreation; you are responsible for your own judgement in the field.
Screen brightness all the way down. Red light preserves your night vision.
Three readings of the Pole Star, in degrees:
Every outing ends with a plate for your Ledger: a record of something you actually did, beside the field-log card you filled in out there. Print it on good paper. A year from now you’ll have twelve outings you can hold in your hand.
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A daylight scout. Learn to read rubs, scrapes, trails and beds, find the saddles and benches where the land funnels game, and build a pocket pace-count tally to map them. Plus: Fenn’s chain was not true. Nor, it seems, was Fenn.