Ridge Walk

The Projection

Chapter 9: Ridge Walk

He went alone. He told Jin to stay at the camp and process the cross-section data, to run the computations, to generate the preliminary DEM on the laptop from the GPS positions, to do the digital work that Jin did well and that Silas did not need to supervise. The real reason was that he wanted to be alone on the ridge. The real reason was that the ridge was not a survey task but a personal one, and he did not want company for it.

He left at four in the morning. The sun had been up for an hour, having dipped to within a degree of the horizon at midnight and then risen again without setting, the long arc of the solstice sun inscribing a circle above the mountains, and the light at four was the light he had told Jin was best for surveying — flat, even, diffuse, the sun low enough to skim the terrain without casting the harsh shadows that confused the eye and complicated the instrument readings. But he was not surveying this morning. He was walking.

He carried a light pack: water, food, the Brunton compass, the field notebook, a rain jacket. He did not carry the theodolite. He did not carry the GPS. He left the instruments in the camp and walked up the slope with only the notebook and the compass and his eyes, and the lightness of the pack was the lightness of a different purpose, the purpose of seeing rather than measuring, of looking rather than sighting, of being in the terrain rather than reducing the terrain to data.

The slope was steep from the start. The bench above the creek rose at twenty degrees, the tundra giving way to scree — loose, angular fragments of shale and quartzite that shifted under his boots and forced him to climb with the careful, deliberate footwork of a man who had walked scree for four decades and knew that the consequences of a fall increased with age, that the body at sixty-three did not bounce the way it had at twenty-five, that the bones and joints and ligaments that had carried him through six hundred field days were approaching the end of their service life and should be treated with the same care he gave the theodolite.

He climbed for an hour. The scree gave way to a band of exposed bedrock — the quartzite again, the same resistant bed that had produced the cliff at station eight, here angled at forty-five degrees, the bedding planes serving as steps, the rock solid and trustworthy after the instability of the scree. He climbed the bedrock with his hands and feet, using the natural holds, the joints and fractures and ledges that the rock provided, and the climbing was satisfying in a way that walking was not, the directness of it, the unambiguous relationship between effort and elevation, each pull of the hands and push of the feet producing a measurable gain, the altimeter on the compass ticking upward: 2,800 feet, 3,000, 3,200.

Above the bedrock, the slope eased. The ridge was broad here, a rounded crest of tundra and lichen-covered rock, the terrain gentle enough to walk upright, the wind steady from the north, cold, carrying the smell of snow from the high peaks to the west. He walked the ridge to the east, following the crest, the valley dropping away on his left, the adjacent drainage dropping away on his right, and he was on the divide between two worlds, two watersheds, two drainages that would eventually reach the same ocean but by different routes, the water on his left flowing to the Koyukuk and then to the Yukon and then to the Bering Sea, the water on his right flowing to another creek and another river and eventually, probably, to the same Bering Sea, the two paths diverging from this ridge and converging a thousand miles away.

He stopped at a high point on the ridge, approximately 3,800 feet, and looked down at the valley.

The valley was below him, a green trough between the ridges, the creek a silver thread in the center, the willows a darker green along the banks, the gravel bar where the camp was a pale spot near the confluence with the Koyukuk. He could see the entire drainage from this elevation — the braided mouth, the broad lower reach, the narrowing middle section, the steep upper section, the saddle at the headwaters. The valley was laid out before him the way a map was laid out on a table, the way the quad sheet was laid out on the light table in the USGS office, and from this elevation the correspondence between the map and the territory was visible, was tangible, was the thing that had drawn him to cartography in the first place — the recognition that the view from above and the lines on the paper were the same thing, that the map was a view from above rendered in symbols, that the cartographer was, in a sense, always on the ridge, always looking down, always seeing the terrain from the God's-eye perspective that the map provided.

But the view from the ridge was not the view from the map. The map was abstract — lines and colors and symbols on a flat page. The view from the ridge was concrete — rock and tundra and water and light, three-dimensional, textured, moving. The creek moved. The willows moved in the wind. The clouds moved across the sky, their shadows moving across the tundra, patches of dark on the green, the light and the shadow in continuous motion, the landscape alive in a way that the map could not capture because the map was static, was frozen, was a single instant of terrain pinned to a page.

He sat down on the tundra and opened the field notebook and began to sketch. Not a map sketch — not a sketch of contour lines and station positions and drainage patterns. A landscape sketch. A sketch of the valley as it appeared from the ridge, the mountains in the background, the creek in the center, the willows and the tundra and the gravel bar and the camp, the whole scene rendered in pencil on the waterproof page, the drawing rough and unfinished and not good, because he was not an artist, had never been an artist, had never had the training or the talent or the eye that Margot had, the eye that saw the landscape as a composition rather than a geometry.

He drew anyway. He drew because Margot was not here to draw, and someone should draw it, someone should make a record that was not data, not measurement, not the reduction of the landscape to numbers. Someone should draw the valley as it looked from the ridge at five in the morning on a June day, the light golden on the east-facing slopes and grey in the shadow of the west-facing slopes, the creek catching the sun in fragments, the mountains beyond the valley rising into a sky that was blue at the zenith and pale at the horizon and streaked with cirrus clouds that had appeared overnight and that indicated a change in the weather, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after.

The sketch was bad. The proportions were wrong. The mountains were too small and the valley was too wide and the creek did not look like water but like a line drawn by a shaking hand, which was what it was. He was not Margot. He could not render the landscape with her fluid accuracy, her intuitive grasp of perspective and proportion, her ability to see the essential shapes and set them down on paper with brushstrokes that were themselves a kind of language, a visual language that spoke directly to the eye without passing through the analytical filter that Silas could not turn off, the filter that saw angles and distances and elevations where Margot saw color and light and form.

He looked at the sketch. He looked at the valley. The gap between them was the gap between his ability and his intention, between what he could draw and what he wanted to draw, and the gap was enormous, was unbridgeable, was the distance between a cartographer and a painter, between measurement and art, between reduction and expression.

Margot would have bridged it. Margot would have sat on this ridge with her paint box and her portable easel and her water jar and her brushes and she would have mixed the colors and laid them on the paper and the valley would have appeared, not as it was — no painting captured the thing as it was — but as it passed through her, as it was filtered through her perception and her training and her accumulated experience of looking at landscapes and seeing in them the things that deserved to be preserved.

What she preserved: the quality of the light. The relationship between colors. The texture of the terrain. The feeling of being in a place, the emotional content of a landscape that had no emotions of its own but that evoked emotions in the human beings who stood in it.

What she sacrificed: precision. Position. The exact coordinates of the ridge, the exact elevation of the creek, the exact distance from the foreground to the background. The numbers. The data. The things Silas preserved.

He closed the notebook. The sketch was inside it, between the pages of data, between the station observations and the cross-section measurements, a foreign element in the field notebook, a non-datum among the data, and he felt slightly embarrassed by it, the way you feel embarrassed when you do something that is outside your competence, something that reveals the limits of your training and the narrowness of your skills.

But he did not tear the page out. He left it there, between station fourteen and station fifteen, between the 1.3-meter discrepancy and the cross-section at station eleven, a small, poorly drawn landscape wedged between the numbers, the only representation in the notebook that was not a measurement but an attempt, however inadequate, to see the valley the way Margot would have seen it.

He sat on the ridge for a long time. The sun moved. The light changed. The shadows shifted on the tundra, the dark patches moving eastward as the sun tracked north, and the valley below him changed with the light, the colors deepening and warming, the golden quality of the early morning giving way to the fuller, richer light of mid-morning, the light that Margot had called the working light, the light that was bright enough to see the colors truly but not so bright that it washed them out.

He remembered a day in the Wrangells, fifteen years ago. They had been together in the field — one of the rare trips where Margot had come along, carrying her paint box and her easel while Silas carried the theodolite and the notebooks. They had camped at the base of a glacier, the Nabesna Glacier, and in the morning they had walked to the lateral moraine and Silas had set up the theodolite to survey the terminus and Margot had set up her easel to paint it, and they had worked side by side, measuring and painting the same ice.

The glacier was retreating. Silas measured the position of the terminus and compared it to the position on the quad sheet, and the terminus had retreated eight hundred meters since the map was published in 1960, an average of about eighteen meters per year, and the rate was accelerating, the ice thinning and pulling back faster each decade, the glacier responding to the warming climate with the slow, massive inevitability of a body that was too large to react quickly but too sensitive to ignore the signal.

Margot had painted the terminus. She had painted the ice blue and white and grey, the colors of old glacial ice, and she had painted the moraine brown and grey, the debris the glacier left behind as it retreated, the rubble of a landscape that had been overridden and released, ground down and deposited, the glacier's own kind of mapping — a mapping of the terrain by the weight of ice, the terrain reshaped by the thing that moved over it, the way a hand reshaped the vellum by the pen that moved over it, leaving marks that were not the terrain but were about the terrain, were faithful to the terrain in the ways that the instrument — hand or glacier — could manage.

She had painted the sky above the glacier a pale blue that shifted to lavender at the edges, the color of distance, the color of the atmosphere itself, the color that you saw when you looked at the sky and realized that the sky was not empty but was full of scattered light, the light bouncing off molecules and particles, the light bent and redirected by the medium it traveled through, the way a surveyor's sightline was bent and redirected by the atmosphere, the refraction that made distant objects appear higher than they were, the atmosphere's own kind of projection, its own distortion of the true position.

He had that painting too. It hung in the living room in Fairbanks, above the sofa, a large oil on canvas, three feet by four feet, the glacier filling the center of the composition, the moraine in the foreground, the sky above, the mountains on either side. It was the largest painting Margot had ever made in the field — she usually worked small, eight by ten or twelve by sixteen, the portable sizes that fit in the paint box — and she had spent three days on it, working in the mornings when the light was best, and Silas had surveyed the glacier terminus while she painted it, and in the evenings they had compared their work, his measurements and her painting, his numbers and her colors, and the comparison had been, he understood now, the most intimate thing they did together, more intimate than the physical intimacy of the tent at night, because the comparison revealed their ways of seeing, their fundamental approaches to the same world, and in the comparison each recognized the other's truth, the truth that their own instrument could not measure.

He had not looked at the glacier painting since Margot died. He had walked past it every day, as he walked past all the paintings, and he had not looked at it, and the not-looking was a choice, a deliberate avoidance, a decision to sacrifice the experience of seeing her work in order to preserve his ability to function in the house, in the daily routine of meals and sleep and equipment checks and email and the thousand small tasks that constituted the surface of a life.

The projection of his grief. What it preserved: function. What it sacrificed: everything else.

He stood up from the tundra. The wind had picked up, the cold air from the north pressing against his face, and he zipped his jacket and started back down the ridge, descending the way he had ascended, in reverse, the bedrock and then the scree and then the tundra bench and then the creek, the camp visible below him, the yellow tent, the equipment cases, Jin moving between the cases and the laptop, working, processing, doing the digital work that would continue after Silas retired, the work that did not require the ridge or the sunrise or the sketch in the notebook.

He reached the camp at nine. Jin looked up from the laptop.

"How was the ridge," Jin said.

"Good visibility. I could see the whole drainage."

"Get any measurements."

"No. I left the instruments."

Jin looked at him. Silas could see the question in his face — why would you climb a ridge without instruments — and could see Jin decide not to ask it.

"The DEM is coming along," Jin said. "The preliminary surface looks good. Contour intervals at twenty feet, as you specified. There are some artifacts in the steep sections where the station spacing is wide, but those should resolve when we add the detail data."

"Show me."

Jin turned the laptop. On the screen was a three-dimensional rendering of the valley, the terrain surface computed from the GPS positions at the twenty-six stations and the supplementary observations, the surface colored by elevation — blue at the lowest points, green in the middle, brown and white at the highest. The contour lines were overlaid in black, twenty-foot intervals, tracing the shape of the valley with the smooth, computed precision of an algorithm that did not know the terrain but knew the numbers.

Silas looked at the DEM. It was good. The general shape of the valley was correct — the broad lower reach, the narrowing middle section, the steep upper section, the saddle at the headwaters. The contour lines followed the terrain with reasonable accuracy, bending into the drainage where the streams entered the main valley, curving around the ridges, crowding together on the steep slopes and spreading apart on the gentle ones. The cliff at station eight was represented as a cluster of closely spaced contour lines, which was not wrong but was not quite right either, because the cliff was not a steep slope but a vertical face, and the contour lines could not distinguish between the two.

"The cliff needs hachures," Silas said. "The algorithm can't do that."

"I know. I'll add them manually."

Silas nodded. He looked at the DEM again. He looked at the valley through the tent door. The DEM and the valley were the same thing, expressed in different media — one in pixels, one in rock and tundra and water. The DEM was accurate. It was useful. It was the future of cartography, the representation that would replace the hand-drawn map the way the GPS had replaced the theodolite, inevitably, irreversibly, correctly.

But the DEM did not contain the sketch in the notebook. The DEM did not contain the quality of the light at five in the morning on the ridge. The DEM did not contain the memory of Margot painting the glacier, or the feeling of standing on the divide between two watersheds, or the sound of the wind on the tundra, or the smell of the quartzite in the sun.

These were not data. They were not measurements. They were not the kind of information that a GIS could store or a DEM could represent or an algorithm could process. They were the content of experience, the residue of being in a place with a particular body and a particular history and a particular loss, and they were what Margot had spent her career trying to capture, and they were what Silas had spent his career learning to exclude, and the exclusion had been necessary, had been correct, had been the discipline of his craft, and the cost of the discipline was that the map was accurate and the cartographer was impoverished.

He did not say any of this. He said: "Looks good. Keep working. I'm going to process the field notes."

He sat at the edge of the camp with the notebook open and began transcribing the station data into the computation sheets, converting the raw angles and distances into positions and elevations, the work of reduction, the work of turning the field observations into the numbers that would become the map. The work was familiar and absorbing and it occupied the analytical part of his mind, the part that worked with numbers and equations and geometric relationships, and it left the other part free, the part that thought about Margot and the ridge and the sketch and the glacier and the paintings on the walls of the house in Fairbanks.

He worked all morning. He worked through lunch. He worked until the numbers blurred and the pencil point went dull and the notebook was full of computations and the stations were reduced and the positions were computed and the map, in its numerical form, was nearly complete.

Tomorrow they would take the last detail measurements. The day after, they would break camp. Carl would come for them. They would fly south to Fairbanks. He would go home to the house with the paintings. He would sit at the drafting table. He would unroll the vellum. He would pick up the Rapidograph pen. He would begin to draw.

And the drawing would be the final reduction — the translation of the field notebook into the map, the conversion of the measurements into the contour lines, the transformation of the three-dimensional valley into the two-dimensional page. The projection. The sacrifice.

He would sacrifice color. He would sacrifice light. He would sacrifice the sound of the creek and the smell of the tundra and the feeling of the wind on the ridge. He would sacrifice the sketch that was not good enough and the memory of Margot that was too good, too vivid, too present. He would sacrifice everything that was not geometry, everything that was not contour and distance and elevation, and what remained would be the map, the clean, precise, beautiful map that showed the shape of the ground and nothing else.

Unless.

The thought came to him on the ridge, in the wind, in the light that Margot would have called golden. The thought was: what if this map is different. What if this map, the last map, preserves something that the other maps did not. What if the legend — the explanation of the symbols, the key that tells the reader what the lines and colors mean — includes something new, something that no map legend has ever included. What if the legend says: this contour line represents not just an elevation but a memory. This blue line represents not just a creek but the sound of water over rock. This brown line represents not just a ridge but the light on the ridge at five in the morning on a June day in the Brooks Range, the light that a painter would have painted and a cartographer can only note.

The thought was impractical. The thought was sentimental. The thought was the kind of thought that a sixty-three-year-old man had when he stood on a ridge alone and looked at a valley that his wife would never see and understood that the map he was making was the last thing he would make and that the last thing should mean something beyond the geometry.

He put the thought aside. He did not put it away.