Safe Travels

SAN FRANCISCO--I am a Wandering Naturalist because I love to wander. I appreciate the freedom we have to travel safely around the world. It wasn't always so.

I have begun commuting across the bay to Alcatraz Island five days a week. I have no fear of the ship going down. It wasn't always so. The first lighthouse on the West Coast was built there in the 1850s, for good reason. Many a ship foundered on the rocky hazards inside that Golden Gate.

Things have changed a bit, certainly. My father is a physicist and has spent much of his life improving satellite navigation and developing the Global Positioning System, especially for ships, at first. This was a difficult profession to explain to my elementary school classmates. "What does your daddy do?" "He's an engineer." "Cool! He drives a train?" "Uh, no, he's an aerospace engineer." "Cool! He flies a rocket?"

Nowadays it's a bit different. Instead of drawing treasure maps, "Go five paces left," kids are using their GPS receivers to go geocaching.

But I don't bring all this up just to brag about my dad. In fact, when he was the president of the Institute of Navigation, in 2001, the annual convention in Salt Lake City was not very well attended. He flew in the day before the conference to help prepare. The scheduled start date was Sept. 11. And from that time on, none of us took safe travel for granted any more.