Lost - an Analysis on Sense of Direcion

As a diamond prospector and hunter
living for several  years in the African bush
learning to orientate and find my way back to camp
 in a monotonous landscape
was at times a life and death objective

In one incident
preoccupied in thought
i had wondered out of a recently pitched camp site
without paying any attention to orientation

Fortunately only a few minutes later
a subconscious alarm went off
jerking me out of my reverie
into the here and now
forcing me to take stock of my position

I turned around to look
i had camped deep in the Ituri thicket
in what was then Tanganyika Territory
vision was restricted to less than fifty yards
my tent was nowhere in sight

I was surrounded by several thousand square miles
of virgin thicket
sans roads or habitation for a hundreds of miles in any direction
the ground was rock hard kilamatindi cement
no grass
just iron hard thicket
thus no tracks
with every avenue identical

my heart beat doubled
i was faced with a 180 degree choice
if i was just few degrees off course
i could miss the camp and never see it
and go and on by for hundreds of miles
without weapon, food or water

In those days
East Africa was rife with stories of  hunters
walking in circles for days in the bushveld
dying from sheer panic

remembering that
is sat down
and forced myself to calm down 

hidden somewhere in my subconscious
was the exact moment i had left camp
and a note of the direction I had chosen

some twenty minutes later
I got up
and without thinking
walked straight back to my camp

during the succeeding years in Africa
I learned to trust my instinctive sense of direction completely

i immigrated to North America 30 years ago
i and suddenly found myself disorientated
this lost sense of direction lasted for nearly five years
before my sense of direction became instinctual again

the uncomfortable sense of feeling lost on the home planet
for all those years in my new location
it made me wonder

the old memory of being temporarily lost in the bushveld
and finding my way back to camp subconsciously
got me thinking about our instinctive sense of direction
the same one
homing pigeons
and salmon  have
and how it functions

how and why did i
have it
loose it
and then get it back again

I have formed a couple of theories of my own
any one of which may
or even both working together
may not be known to any other person


Magnetic Alignment

depending on which side of the equator we live
our sense of direction is governed by our atomic polarities
which are orientated on the magnetic attraction of the north pole
or that of the south pole

in my case I was born and raised in the southern hemisphere
and thus found myself  disorientated by 180degrees
when i came to live in the northern hemisphere
it took some five years for my atomic body
to realign on the magnetic northern pole

I confirmed this magnetic orientation theory last year
when I went to live with in SA with Sandy, my sister,

this was my first trip back across the equator for 35 years

for the entire two months that i was there
i remained directionally disorientated
precisely by 180 degrees

My sisters residence was located directly west of the
the familiar north-south Joburg/Pretoria road
which i have traveled innumerable times in the past
each time i arrived at the junction
i kept turning in the exact opposite direction
from the city I was born and raised in
i knew it would take five years
to realign on the south pole

This is the same reason why we should mark the pole side of a tree
before transplanting it
and put it back in the same alignment

I confirm
meat and bone cellular behavior
enjoy the same magnetic alignment


Coriolis Effect

falling objects
and water swirling down a drain
veer right in the northern hemisphere
and left in the South

It is possible that the Coriolis effect
has an imperceptible rotational pull
on the cerebro-spinal fluid in the brain