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P R O LO G U E Orientation: The Front Chainman Loses His Bearings No one could remember a government surveyor actually going crazy, especially while on the job, out in the field running line. I’d heard stories about surveyors who were sadistic, alcoholic, unhygienic , or incompetent (although there were fewer incompetentsurveyor stories than you might think), but Jim Williams was the first to enter the annals of the Cadastral Survey as having crossed that boundary line into the condition we referred to uncharitably as mental. He was also one of the first surveyors in anyone’s memory to get lost, lost seriously enough that we had to stop work and redeploy our survey crew as a search party. Like me, Williams was a summer temporary, hired back for his second year, having done well enough the year before to be promoted from flagman to front chainman. Pulling the long measuring chain through the desert and mountain landscape of southern Utah was a difficult job, one that he’d been learning quickly and managing pretty well, and so we had been puzzled that morning when he’d hiked out dragging the chain behind him and had just kept walking, not stopping to pull the chain tight against Larry’s pull long enough to take the measurement. At first we didn’t connect his failing to stop with the odd behavior he’d been demonstrating for the couple of weeks we’d been on this particular job, the first one of the summer. It wasn’t unusual for an inexperienced front chainman, focusing too much on the 1 2 Shooting Polaris difficult terrain through which he was supposed to thread the chain, or distracted by a hawk circling picturesquely overhead, or made dizzy by the first symptoms of sunstroke, to walk too far and have to back up a little. But even Larry’s shouting “Williams? Williams ! Far enough!” didn’t slow him down, and that was unusual. Besides being the rear chainman, Larry Daniels was the party chief—our boss—and his yell generally had enough force and credibility to freeze us in our tracks until he was able to explain how we’d screwed up and what we needed to do to get it right. Instead, Williams just kept going, still walking a pretty straight line and still dragging the long steel measuring tape we continued to call a “chain” because its ancestor two hundred years earlier had actually been a chain—and by the time we all realized something was wrong, he’d disappeared into the tall sagebrush, leaving us with the dawning understanding that this could be serious: a crazy guy taking off fast into some of the steepest, driest, and most chaotic landscape in southern Utah. Larry sent Matt back to the truck, telling him to loop downhill in Williams’s general direction along the dirt road we’d bounced in on that morning, and Larry, Tim, and I set out following the tracks Williams had left in the soft sand. The waffle print of Williams’s boots and the odd linear scrape of the chain he pulled left a trail that looked a little like the tracks lizards leave in soft sand, only human-sized, and made him pretty easy to follow, at least until we came to a wide bulging expanse of bare sandstone slickrock, and lost him. That’s when we started to get worried. I’d met Jim Williams just two weeks earlier, at the orientation meeting that began each surveying season in early June. My girlfriend , Karen, had dropped me off in front of Salt Lake City’s federal building, near the large plaza that had been the setting for marches and rallies I’d attended faithfully over the preceding several years protesting the war in Vietnam. The drive had been quiet and a little awkward, the result of our not having finished our discussion the night before concerning when I’d be back, and whether or not we were actually living together—I’d sort of moved some of my belongings to her apartment for the summer but wasn’t really sure where I actually lived, whether in the apartment that I’d just sublet to a fellow student until September, or in Karen’s apartment , or even in the government bunk trailer in which I’d actually Prologue: The Front Chainman Loses His Bearings 3 be spending most of my nights that summer. It was dawning on both...

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