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C H A P T E R S I X Visitors Focus is just about everything to the surveyor. Squinting into the transit’s eyepiece and turning the knobs to center the crosshairs and magnify the details, you apprehend only a tiny framed circle of reality. It’s like peering out of a tunnel, or the barrel of a gun: the rest of the world becomes peripheral and unimportant, fading into the dark that surrounds that bright round fragment of what you can see. Later, doing the calculations, you focus on the exact numbers: the degrees, minutes, and seconds of an angle; the miles, feet, and tenths of distance; the coordinates that define a precise point of intersection between the abstract and the concrete, between doing the math and running the line. Because a good survey is the result of an almost compulsive attention to detail, it’s easy to forget the big picture: what it means, why it’s done, how it fits in. It’s easy to forget what all those bearings and distances, all those numbers, add up to. For most surveyors, this isn’t much of a problem. If you do your work well, the numbers slowly assume the shape of something tangible and familiar: a highway, a house, a white picket fence. But if you’re a government surveyor, as I was, the problem of focus becomes more serious, because the particular lines we ran added up to something substantial. The current BLM Manual of Surveying Instructions told us only what we needed to know: the lines we measured and calculated added up to the thirty-six-square-mile grid called a township, and the lines that defined each township’s 107 108 Shooting Polaris boundary connected with other township boundaries to throw a precise net over the broad expanse of America. The Manual helped us understand that the field notes we sent in to the central office were translated into maps and documents that served a larger national purpose, but beyond that we didn’t think about it too much. We seldom paused to consider the audacity and ambition of our work, the fact that our lines determined quite literally the shape of the landscape upon which the United States of America has been constructed. Surveyors worked entire summers without ever questioning the reasons for spending their days imposing Western civilization’s most prized artifact—the straight line—upon the irregularity of natural landscape. I began asking a few modest questions that second summer, probably because it was my first experience working on an original survey. The summer before, I had served as a soldier in an army of occupation, our resurveying intended merely to resupply and fortify a position already taken by surveyors a hundred years before. This summer, however, I was storming a fresh beach, a grunt enlisted in the most recent campaign advancing the fivehundred -year European invasion of the New World, using technologies and tactics that had recently—as I was to learn—been perfected in Vietnam. We spent the day the helicopter arrived flying over the more rugged and less accessible portions of our township north of Nipple Bench, and that evening, over Warren Knowles’s expensive beer, Matt and I pondered the twisted and chaotic expanse of southern Utah desert we’d been assigned, wondering out loud for the first time that summer just what the central office had in mind. We understood that the coal deposits and power plant sites were high on somebody’s list, somebody important, and were the most obvious reasons why we’d been funded so lavishly for so isolated a survey, but we also knew that there was a bigger picture to be considered, and that night we talked a little about what that big picture might be. Our discussion was prompted in part by the helicopter pilot, a slight man with thinning hair and muttonchop sideburns and a soft English accent named Alan, who turned out to be not at all like the other pilots I’d fly with over the next several years. I’d discover that most helicopter pilots working for the private companies contracted by the BLM had learned and practiced their craft Visitors 109 only a few years earlier in Vietnam; they were invariably small, wiry men in their late twenties, and fucked-up in a variety of ways, not all of them the result of having spent a couple of years being shot at, and in...

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