6/11/17

i'm thankful that on the ride there, we talked about land surveying, which was the job he did for twenty seven years. i'm thankful to have learned about the plum bob, which was invented by the ancient egyptians to build the pyramids, and the theodolite, which is a scope that includes a grid used for measuring distances and angles. i'm thankful to have learned that the grid was originally made with the silk from spiders and then cat gut. i'm thankful to have learned that the chain surveyors use to measure distances is 66 feet long for a reason, which has to do with how the multiples of that chain length simplify capturing the accurate capturing of an acre.

i'm thankful to have learned that the size and shape of the boxes of land you see when you fly over land was defined in revolutionary america, another jeffersonian attempt to impose classical order on the world (a map of the land made by his clockmaker god). i'm thankful to have learned about townships as geographic rather than political units, to have thought about how all the little flags and markers you see everywhere are encoded with meaning to people who know what they're looking for, even though they read as abstractions to the rest of us. 

i'm thankful to have learned that the first job he took after he got out of college was in battle creek, michigan. i'm thankful that he told me about how in surveying, historically, you worked in at least two man units (i'm thankful for lewis and clark)—one man setting the chain in the ground at the front of the length, the other pulling up the back spike of the chain, that process continuing forever, slowly inching a grid across the wilderness. 

i'm thankful that j told me that the grizzled old surveyor who he was partnered with on his first job took him out to breakfast at a local diner, which was how the always started the day. i'm thankful that the surveyor quizzed him on what he'd learned in school and then told him he didn't know anything, then asked him if he knew how to roll. i'm thankful that j asked what he meant and the surveyor looked at him like he was an idiot said "do you know how to roll joints?" and j said yes and the surveyor sent him out to the car to prove it. 

i'm thankful he told me how that day they smoked a joint in the car on the way to the site, smoked another when they got there, worked till their lunch break, smoked another before starting work again, and then smoked another on the way home. i'm thankful he told me that this was basically how every day went for many years. i'm thankful that i, thinking about the many nice times i've had taking long stoned walks in nature, said that i imagined that must have enhanced the experience and i'm thankful he agreed, except during the parts of the the job that involved doing large amounts of trigonometry in longhand.

i'm thankful for the strangeness of that combination he described, of sitting and doing a very complex calculation of an angle in your log book, then using an axe to cut through brush, then taking some exacting measurements, then using a sledgehammer to bury a still spike into the corner of a property. i'm thankful to have learned how land surveyors were a kind of order, a lineage, an insular artisanal society where honor was important since what was being determined was the structure of the world and society, the lines of the land and elevation. 

i'm thankful for his rhapsodic descriptions of the connection to not just land but history, the research required at city and county archives, how he would be looking at surveys of land done a hundred and fifty years previous and would go out to reevaluate them and find that with crude tools and in difficult conditions the surveyors that came before had come within tenths of an degree to the measurements he made with modern tools and knowledge.

i'm thankful for his description of his sadness that the combination of the 2008 financial crisis and the contemporaneous rapid development and adoption of GPS and laser technology destroyed the profession by making it something that one eighteen year old with the right tools can do, without the education and craft that was required for those who came before. 

i'm thankful for our conversation about how the efficiency gains of american workers in the late twentieth century didn't result in equivalent gains in compensation and about the shitty paradox of these men, who in some ways represent the transition from a capitalism that was of physical capital, of land and the things that could be built on it and done with it and ripped out of it, to one of late capitalism, of lasers shooting from emitters to receivers, value measured in the ephemeral wavelengths of light blinking on and off.

i'm thankful for his sadness over the death of a craft, even as he acknowledged that the profession as it was when he belonged to it was also an incredibly destructive force, especially with regard to its obsession with traditional markers of masculinity and the way that its brutal and itinerant nature led him to destroy his first marriage and ruined the relationships  those of many of the other men he knew. i'm thankful that near the end of this monologue, we found ourselves finally in the small town where d was sitting on the curb outside of a holiday inn express with her wheeled suitcase. 

i'm thankful that a few hours later, after many more stories, j pulled up in front of our house and we said good night to him and reentered the silence of our house after a week apart. i'm thankful that when i had to leave to pick d up i hadn't transferred the sheets and blankets i had washed in advance of her return to the drier, so we slept under an old blanket on an uncovered mattress with lumpy naked pillows i'm thankful that we had a difficult time but that yesterday we took a long sweaty walk together and talked for hours and things are better now. i'm thankful for quiet sunday mornings together, settling back into the routines of our lives.