The satellite terminal failed on day four. We had a backup beacon for emergencies and no way at all to send or receive anything else. Six weeks. I have thought about that period more than almost any other in my working life.
The first week was genuinely unpleasant. I reached for a device that did nothing perhaps forty times a day. By the second week the reaching had stopped, and something else started: I was reading the weather instead of a forecast, and I was noticeably better at it by the end.
Attention as a field skill
There is a version of this essay that becomes a lecture about screens. That is not quite the point. The point is that noticing is a trainable skill, it decays without use, and fieldwork is one of the few remaining contexts that forces the training.
“By the fifth week I could tell you what the swell would do the next morning. I have never been able to do that at home, and I have far better information at home.”
Every season since, I have built in a deliberate stretch — usually ten days — with communications off by arrangement rather than by accident. The team knows in advance. The data is better and so is everybody's judgement.
