The New England Orienteering Club - NEOC promotes the sport of Orienteering -- navigating with map and compass. Events in Boston area, MA, RI, CT. All welcome!

Literary Orienteering #4

by Peter Amram

In Sermons in Stone, a cheery rumination on that staple of off-trail orienteering in the northeast, the stone wall, the author, Susan Allport, declares:

Taken together, the states of New England and New York had more miles of stone walls [in 1871] than the United States has miles of railroad track today. The work that went into them, according to one estimate, would have built the pyramids of Egypt one hundred times over. It has been said that two men could build about ten feet of stone wall a day, an estimate that included the time required to gather the stone and lay a foundation. (p. 18)

Think of that the next time you gratefully scamper alongside some long-dead farmer’s boundary, in hopes of locating a little orange-and-white triangular box kite.

Literary Orienteering #2

by Peter Amram

The hero of Kim, Rudyard Kipling's classic of adventure and intrigue in India in the late 19th century, is a young Irish orphan, Kimball O'Hara. Kim enters a school specializing in geography and cartography. His covert sponsor for this education was the cynical and exacting British Secret Service, and Kim was being prepared as an intelligence agent for the Great Game: the struggle between the British and Russians for control of Central Asia.

Literary Orienteering #3

by Peter Amram

Literary Orienteering

by Peter Amram

Literary Orienteering, or Lit-O, is not sterile cogitation by professors at Ivory Tower U. English departments but rather a search in books similar to that quest in the woods for little triangular box kites with a code and a recording device and a welcoming crooked orange-and-white smile, if indeed you do find the damn thing.

In Lit-O, the target is a passage which demonstrates not only that, at its best, art imitates life, but that at its best, life imitates orienteering.