Finding Our Place

Today an old friend is surveying our property. At dawn, he began three blocks away, where he and his partner found a known point, a spot marked and recorded, or geo-referenced in the GPS lingo. Setting bright orange cones around this known spot, they place the tripod just above it. One man shoots a laser beam from an instrument perched on the tripod to the other who stands by a metal pole adorned with a prism mounted at the top, like a wizard wand. The laser beam strikes the prism, which separates the light waves that then bounce to the laser instrument. The two men shout numbers back and forth, like secret code. By nine thirty, they have found a line emanating from the known point to a metal pin half-buried in asphalt in the street in front of our home.

“It all starts from the point,” the man shooting lasers tells me, “and everything works from that point outward.” He moves his hands in an expanding circle to emphasize the radiant nature of finding one’s place. I think of the axis mundi, the ancient and enduring practice human beings have for locating themselves in reference to earth and the cosmos.

Our old friend walks to an unremarkable spot in our front grass and waves another wand over the ground. The yellow box on top, the wand’s talisman, begins to whine like those plastic pipes that make whoo-whoop sounds when children pull the metal rod.

“I found it,” he says and takes a shovel and begins to dig. Two feet down, he hits a rusty ½ inch pipe poking up through the damp rich clay soil.

“There it is,” he says in the clear language men who work their hands use. He found one of the property markers that another man hammered into the ground in 1954. He unearthed another under the Chihuahuan sage that was just setting an after-rain bloom. By noon, we will know our place in the world.