Surveying

POETRY

By Rebecca Findlay

To measure distance, you need at least two opposites: one person to hold the transit and one to run out the reflector. Look through the lens for the surveying rod, then scribble the angles and arcseconds. But there are also the chains, the levels; better to get more people and take all the measurements at once. So like the plotter he was, my grandfather begat six children — better for business, more land per day. He’d learned it all on islands in the Pacific Theater, where a mortar wasn’t meant to hold things together, but break them apart, and angles meant lives. Now he preferred to survey in snow, to better sight his kids through the leafless trees, as they huddled into pockets and scarves, known only by the orange hats worn to avoid being shot.

The only wealth anyone had out there was land not worth much, but still helpful to have measured. When short on money, clients would give him a bit of the newly parceled land, unusable maybe, or steep, and he would accept, unable to ask for more, unable to refuse, a hoarder through and through. So he gathered up the maps and children, drove home without anything else. I was not born to be so useful, and I can’t conscript

others into my work, but I look over landscapes to collect sights and boundaries and signs, to find the shortest distance and make lines.

When he died, we found eight theodolites, eleven transits, hundreds of rolled maps, rolls of orange tape, scraps of flaggers, decades of National Geographics, all scrawled with measurements and names. No one can know or want all the belongings and longings of someone when they go out of focus. He left his cartography of the stars and pieces of land, a patchwork of roods, dekares, quarter acres worth only trouble. We got the telescope he built, bigger than belief. He had taught me how to look through lenses at far off hillsides sliding up into the night, to bridge gaps with vision, not words.