radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
radiantfracture ([personal profile] radiantfracture) wrote2017-02-02 07:07 pm

The Wolves of LORAN

I had a dream last night that L. was feeding baby wolves and I thought it was a bad idea. Very early this morning I skimmed an illustrated post about lycanthropy.

A little bit later, though still far too early, my creative co-worker gave me a ride to my 8:30 am class (heated seats!) (in the car, not the classroom). She told me about the resort where her son works in the summer, which resort shares its remote island with a family of wolves.

She said the island was once a station for something I had never heard of called LORAN. LORAN was a hyperbolic radio navigation system (so the Internet tells me) implemented during WWII and continued in a confusing series of forms (well, A, B and C) [Edit: I had the date wrong here] Loran-A went off the air in North America in 1980, but apparently Loran-C was in use until 2010.

This island station was paired with one in southern Alaska. It was stood down1 in 1977 “after a fire in a generator room,” according to the labour-of-love website on which I found this information.

But what if it was really the wolves?

I sense a rabbit hole gently caving in under my feet.

Talk of mysteriously defunct signal stations reminds me a little of the CBC holiday tradition of playing Fireside Al's gripping rendering of "The Shepherd" on Christmas Eve, in the Dickensian tradition of eerie Christmas stories.


{rf}

1. That usage seems awkward, but that's how the site puts it.
heliopausa: (Default)

[personal profile] heliopausa 2017-02-03 07:54 am (UTC)(link)
That's very interesting, about LORAN - thanks.
legionseagle: Lai Choi San (Default)

[personal profile] legionseagle 2017-02-11 08:15 pm (UTC)(link)
It was a precursor to GPS. I started learning to sail in 1987, and the navigation books talked about it, but the boats I was on either just used mechanical methods or RDF (radio direction finding). RDF really ought to have potential for creepy stories, given you turn the dial until you find the null point on the signal, which means you're pointing directly at the transmitter.