Surveyors

My favorite history:

Surveyors emerging from their cloudlike vehicles into our state's most provident summer to understand the topography behind our lives. Everything that year somehow blooming to a tangled abundance despite the drought, not a single still found in the ragged underbrush. On an eroded hillside: roman candle husks packed into a cinderblock mouth, some ritual flag I could not know.

I remember soft pulses murmured from the devices Surveyors wore on their bodies like regalia, and how partly we knew they wished to discard those bodies and allow their measuring capacities to float around in the thick southern air without tether. They passed from town to town like a thunderhead amassing and dispersing, and the year it took to measure our state's mountains was a year of relentless prosperity, an interval representing our citizens' finest neighborly qualities. Berries overpowered the thorns that year, greens blanketed the enormous, sodden gardens. Surveyors woke before each dawn and measured our mountains into the afternoon, suffering elegantly in the late August heat, dancing little dances to summon flash floods. Each night we took them past the razor-wire barriers and into our hill-region homes, where they broke down, confessing their incredible burden: a compulsion to know the depth of every gorge, the elevation of every mountain. Even the very small, useless mountains rose like bear backs hunched in the snowblur of their dreams (Sawhorse Mt., elev. 495 ft).

This was not entirely unfamiliar. As a community we remembered the summer when Demographers came to the capital with their almanacs composed of dust and their cryptic population rites, how they prayed in statistics, each night reciting the most recent census figures of fifty American cities for penance. Those were also the nights of grid failure and blackout, when Futurists reappeared at the outskirts of our city, setting abandoned hotels aflame, watching the blight smolder and brighten, and then recklessly racing each other around the byzantine arms of the railways, whooping like teenagers. How sweetly prosperous that era had been. How troubling.

While it is true we do not have any mountains (Woodworth Mt? elev. 806 ft.) -- while it is true mountain is our word for hill-, it is a measure of Surveyors' uncommon kindness that they never spoke of their disdain for our inadequacy (Constellation Hill, elev. 522 ft.), that they continued to measure each hill earnestly and canonize each hill with the trite religious or historical names we insisted were necessary. Our typically stodgy governor loved them beyond our expectations; he believed they were incapable of wrongdoing. If he entered the gubernatorial foyer one evening to find Surveyors measuring the elevation of his wife, it was only to join them in a riotous waltz, where the young woman crinkled and creased as the gown of topo charts configured to her shapeliness in the antebellum twilight of the bay windows.

Past which our farmers sowed Surveyors' foreign-sounding names across county lines and thicketed elevations - in the poor places and the rich places, for the Surveyic Hero was the great equalizer that year-, and sometimes, if we behaved exceptionally well, Surveyors delighted us with bedtime stories about their fathers the Cartographers: peace-loving men shunned by the nationalist mainstream explorers; ancient men who roamed this state when it was newly discovered, who mapped by night and made minor repairs to the early world as they mapped; ancient men who climbed steady-handed to the top of the watchtower (Dead General Hill, elev. 691 ft.) by the secure glow of a blazing trashpile to solder brilliant new constellations to the sky with a beam of violent and improbable light.












Jack Boettcher lives in Mississippi and tries to think about mountains the way the T'ang Dynasty poets thought of them.






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