Surveying

Most of the year, then, I spent in ways Thoreau would have recognized: sometimes on the shores of Walden Pond, sometimes atop Ktaadn, alternately healing and agonizing. Summers, however, I approached nature in decidedly unnatural ways, worrying less about understanding nature than helping shape it into something abstract and alien. I worked each summer through most of the 1970s as a surveyor for the Utah office of the Cadastral Survey, a sub-bureau of the Bureau of Land Management, and pretty much did what my supervisors told me to do—in spite of the qualms I’d carefully nurtured in my more gentle experiences in nature—and painstakingly documented in the University of Utah library. I spent eight long summers helping Thomas Jefferson achieve his dream of an American landscape entirely and eternally subdivided into perfect square-mile sections, personally doing those observations, measurements and calculations that pay homage to our founding fathers’ vision of a classically ordered and economically useful American landscape, committing crimes against the southern Utah landscape I’ve spent many years repenting for. I can’t plead ignorance: even then, I understood that my work on a government survey crew was imperialistic, phallocentric, and linear beyond any right-brain redemption. My reading in French philosophy helped me understand that land surveying was existentially inauthentic, and my reading in Marxist theory made it impossible for me to deny that the rectangular survey did anything other than promote the agenda of the ruling class.

As a result of this basic conflict in my life, I was required to spend each fall, winter, and spring defending what I’d been doing each summer. At one point, a group of my friends arranged a kind of intervention, forcing me to face the essential hypocrisy of my life and demanding that I come to terms with my environmental incorrectness, an all-night confrontation that culminated with a woman shouting at me: “How dare you draw lines on nature!” Exhausted, I told her it was only a job, money for tuition and rent and auto repair, but even as I said the words, I knew I wasn’t telling her the truth. The truth was that I loved my work, loved it in ways that involved need and dependence and even, as happens in the deepest loves, the possibility for both physical and spiritual transcendence.

http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20B%20Vol.%2011-16.1/Vol.%2013.1/13.1Hales.htm