The Surveyor

He had spent forty years measuring land that did not belong to him. He had never owned a single acre.

This did not bother him. Or rather, it had bothered him once, when he was young and newly married and full of the ordinary ambitions of young married men. But the ambitions had faded, as ambitions do, and what remained was the work itself — the clean, precise work of measurement, of establishing where one thing ended and another began.

His name was Aldous, which was a name that had caused him some difficulty as a child and which he had grown into, eventually, the way you grow into a house that is slightly too large for you.

He was sixty-three now and his knees were bad and he was thinking about retirement, which he thought about the way you think about a country you have never visited — with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension.

On his last day of work, he was sent to survey a parcel of land on the edge of town — a piece of undeveloped land that a developer wanted to build on. He had surveyed this same parcel twice before, years apart, and each time it had remained undeveloped. He had begun to think of it as his land, in the only sense that mattered to him: the sense of knowing it.

He knew where the ground was soft and where it was firm. He knew the oak tree at the northeast corner, which had been there longer than any of the property records. He knew the small depression in the center of the parcel where water collected after rain, and the way the light fell across it in the late afternoon.

He set up his equipment and began to work. The measurements were the same as they had always been. The land had not changed.

When he was done, he sat for a while under the oak tree. The afternoon light was doing what it always did at this hour — going golden, going long. He had measured this light, in a sense, for forty years. He had never owned it.

He thought: this is enough. To have known a thing well. To have been present to it. To have measured it carefully and left it as you found it.

He packed up his equipment and drove home.

The land was sold the following spring. The oak tree was taken down in June.

He did not go back to see it.