On a youth wilderness camping trip, most of us were going on a day-hike
to some nearby lakes. The adult leader wanted those few people who were
staying behind in our trail-camp, to begin preparing dinner at a specified
time, something like 5:00 PM. But of those who were staying behind, nobody
had a watch. (Out there in the wilderness, usually we didn't much care what
time it was. Most of us didn't even like to carry mechanical or electrical
devices into the wilderness; we left things like watches back home, and
enjoyed the wilderness the way it was.)
The adult leader was a civil engineer, much educated in land surveying.
Surveyors are supposed to know how to determine azimuth from the position of
the sun, and the time. So our glorious leader set a straight stick
vertically in the ground to serve as the gnomon of a sun dial. (Our
latitude was in the 30 degrees range.) He made 12 equally-spaced marks on
the ground around the stick, and labeled them like a 12-hour clock, with the
"12" mark pointing north. He told the cooking crew to start preparing
dinner when the stick's shadow reached the "5" mark on the (12-hour) clock
face. I suggested privately to the leader that he might want to rethink his
sun dial; but no, he didn't want to hear about it.
In the late afternoon, the cooking crew noticed that the shadow wasn't
moving much closer to the "5" mark; the shadow just was growing longer.
Fortunately, they decided that something was wrong, so they started cooking
dinner. The rest of us were a bit late in returning from the nearby lakes
(too much fun swimming!), and dinner was just about ready for us when we
arrived back in our camp.
We heard no more about sun dials from our leader. (He really was a good
guy; he just had a temporary lapse of thought.)
Dick Alvarez
Menlo Park, California, USA
