There are five types of navigation, five ways to find your way home: topographic, celestial, magnetic, olfactory and true.
Topographic is used by the lowest forms of life, your mollusks and your limpets. Celestial is the rarest, used by some species of birds, some species of seals, humans, and the dung beetle. Many creatures use a combination: magnetic for broad navigation to general points, then olfactory for specifics.
True can only be used in familiar areas, where one can rely on landmarks: roads, rivers, mountains, buttes, fields, forests, the abandoned house, the one-room Airport Inn, Stauf’s Coffee, the baseball field, the water tower, the corner grocery, the place where this or that memory has imprinted like the fuchsia or the mournful blue on stained glass.
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