Summer stirs our nomadic past and reawakens our animal selves

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/24/summer-nomadic-past-animal-selves-freedom

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It’s remarkable, the collective change summer brings upon us. At a Cornish beach last week, 50 or more people – some clad in wetsuits, some in shorts – stood facing out to sea, daring the uproarious ocean. They resembled wading birds, perhaps a pod of seals, their faces beaming pure, unalloyed joy. They were united by the water, by the sun that had come out of a raincloud, by the highest tide of the year, by the glory of a British summer.

In everyday life – on the tube or bus to work – these people wouldn’t dream of smiling at, let alone talking to, a complete stranger. But for these few short weeks, society, and our expectations, change. Everything gets a bit looser, more chaotic, in an oddly organic way. It’s as if we become animals again, on our summer migration, drawn by instinct to behave as we did in an age before blue screens, broadband and perpetual connection – which, of course, is the very opposite of what it promises to be.

In Bernd Heinrich’s brilliant new book, The Homing Instinct, the acclaimed American biologist sketches out some of the amazing new information scientists have gathered on the notion of home and homing. From the transcontinental migrations of fragile, flame-coloured monarch butterflies – which once turned the New England skies dark in their millions as they flew south to Mexico – to tiny Arctic terns that travel from one pole to another, the natural world is attuned to annual mass movements.

It’s a measure of their navigatory powers that we still don’t know how insects, birds and mammals achieve such miraculous journeys. But we do know that some animals possess special neurons in their brains, attuned to the earth’s electromagnetic circuits – a kind of sixth sense. Heinrich hypothesises that we humans may also have employed this natural satnav, which persists in our residual “sense of direction”. Recent studies even propose that we might possess a particular protein in our eyes, known as a cryptochrome, which enables birds to “see” magnetic fields.

The sun and stars and changing weather all play their part in animal migration. Unconsciously, these are the same triggers at play when we decamp, en masse, in summer, summoning us to the sea. We are operating according to ancient instincts, for all that we do it by car, train, and plane; by bike or even boat. It’s an inexorable, extraordinary passage.

And it enables us to regain our sense of community. Anyone travelling long distances by train over these weeks will have experienced packed carriages. The trains themselves seem to go slower, as if weighed down by human cargo. Carriages which, for the rest of the year, echo to mundane mobile conversations become anarchic, bursting with kids and dogs and bags. We are pressed together, conscious of our humanity – and our animality.

At the beach, we bare flesh. We open out. New interactions come into play. Children and animals weave in and out as another strata, regaining their own level in unthreatening crowds. You might even find yourself, heretically, beyond the digital reach. The natural world takes over.

Why can’t life be like this every day? Why does it all have to close down with the onset of September – the pulling in, tightening up, and the reassuming of hard-set expressions for the rest of the year? Perhaps we have become too shackled to our properties, forgetting our nomadic past. As the philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote: “We no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on Earth and forgotten heaven.” On holiday, we are all migrants. The south-west of England is full of northern and London accents during these weeks. But imagine if we’d had to hide in a shipping container to get here. For our species, migration has become a problem – a consequence of our insularity and greed.

Increasingly, our daily lives deny our social herding instincts, and undermine our common humanity. Heinrich quotes Paul Rogat Loeb, social activist and author of Soul of a Citizen: “We become humans only in the company of other human beings.” Isolated in our daily bubbles, made more so by the technology that claims to connect us, perhaps we ought to seek a perpetual summer vibe – to reunite ourselves and release the animal within. Down at Trebarwith Strand, I watched as my 14-year-old nephew Cyrus dived into the sunlit surf like a sea lion and emerged utterly free, under a clear blue sky. These are the scenes we’ll remember from our lives – not the last email.