On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems That Make Our World Work - Hardcover

Huler, Scott

 
9781605296470: On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems That Make Our World Work
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1605296473 ISBN 13: 9781605296470
Verlag: Rodale Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A lively, captivating investigation into the infrastructure that makes society possible

In our daily lives, we're surrounded by wires, pipes, utility poles, cell phone towers, and a myriad of other infrastructure that facilitate almost everything we do. Even though these systems are essential, when was the last time you gave them much thought? Not only is infrastructure shrouded in mystery, much of it is woefully out of date—bridges are falling, public transportation is overcrowded, and most roads haven't been updated since the 1950s. In On the Grid, Scott Huler sets out to understand all of the systems that shape our society—from transportation, water, and garbage to the Internet coming through our cable lines.

He begins his entertaining, fascinating journey at his house in Raleigh, North Carolina, and travels everywhere from the inside of a storm water pipe to the sewers of ancient Rome. Each chapter follows one element of infrastructure back to its source. Huler visits power plants, watches new asphalt pavement being laid, and traces a drop of water backward from his faucet to the Gulf of Mexico. He reaches out to guides along the way, both the workers who operate these systems and the people who plan them.

A mesmerizing and hilarious narrative, On the Grid is filled with amazing insights, interviews, and stories that bring an overlooked but indispensable subject to life. You'll never look at your day the same way again.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SCOTT HULER is the author of six books including Defining the Wind and No-Man's Lands. Widely published in newspapers nationwide, he has also won awards for his work on NPR. He lives in Raleigh, NC.

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chapter 1

THE LAY OF THE LAND

A surveyor's total station looks something like a movie camera. A rotating lens set in a tough yellow metal housing sits about head high atop a firm, heavy tripod. It measures exact distances by bouncing an infrared signal off a reflector on a pole; it also measures angles to an accuracy of a second or so (less than 1â?"1,000,000 of a circle). A total station showed up at my house one day in the company of Sherrill Styers, a cheerful, slow- moving surveyor in a broad-brimmed hat, T-shirt, and pants held up by suspenders. I'd invited him over because I figured the place to begin understanding how infrastructure got to my property was on my property itself--the ground infra which all those structures lay. Surveying occupies itself with knowing exactly where you are, in all three dimensions. Sewer pipes need to be pitched at just the right slope; a backhoe swipe in the wrong spot can darken dozens of homes and disconnect hundreds of people from the Internet; almost any infrastructure project involves right of way, and nobody wants the city to have an inch more than it deserves. You have to know exactly where you are.

"People don't realize that when they see new roads going in," Styers said. "Before the bulldozers know where to cut or fill, they need surveyors to tell them where and how much." Styers talked as he set up to find my property's corners. He first used a metal detector to find what my deed calls an "existing iron pipe" at the front corner of my yard and dug a little hole to expose the metal bar. Then he set up the station above it, using spirit levels and hairline sights in the machine to orient directly above the center of that old iron bar, sunk there probably 90 years before. While I held the reflector, he took sightings to the corner of my house, the other property corner along the street, and the back corners of my property. Surveying, he explained, is trigonometry: You take extreme care to measure the length of a line, then you take sightings to a distant point from each end, measuring angles. "Then you've gotten your angle-side- angle," Styers said. "You can use the law of sines to calculate, and that's your distance." You use the calculated lengths as the bases of further triangles, in order to measure more angles and calculate more lengths.

Styers practices what he calls cadastral surveying, but is also called metes and bounds surveying: The surveyor starts at one corner monument and describes a trip around the property border, giving measurements (metes) from one landmark to another (bounds). Those landmarks tend to be monuments left by other surveyors: An old survey of my yard starts "at an existing iron pipe" and also mentions "an axle," which, like the pipe, was still right where it was supposed to be, a solid iron rod sticking a good foot out of the ground. "That looks like it could be from...a buggy, maybe," Styers said, opining that in 1918, when my property was platted, cars were taking over and buggy axles may have been losing value. Then he decided it might have been from a Model T. Either way, he liked it--it wasn't going anywhere, and it told you in no uncertain terms that you were at the corner of my backyard. Good, solid surveyor values.

A modern total station measures distances itself, though if the surveyor can't sight directly along a line (if, say, a tree is in the way), he or she has to, use the same triangulation method surveyors have been using for centuries. Some stations even use 2 Global Positioning System (GPS), but, as Styers comments almost dismissively, "your GPS equipment doesn't work too well beneath tree canopy." Google Earth can swoop in on your house, those latitude and longitude tickers spinning dramatically along, state and county borders of pale yellow and blue appearing and disappearing until you get that final view from the sky, shockingly clear, of T-shirts stopped midflap on your clothesline; that's very nice. But if you run into trouble with your neighbor about whose fence is on whose land, the courts will want to know about the piece of iron pipe some surveyor sank to mark your property corner 100 years ago, not what a GPS device says. "There are a lot of precedents set in court," another surveyor told me. "I'll give you an example: If your deed says you have a boundary of 200 feet, and it's from the oak tree to the maple tree, and when you measure it it turns out to be only 190 feet, it's still gonna be the oak tree and the maple tree. Regardless of what technology you use."

Or more simply: "What you buy is represented by your deed," Styers told me, peering along my property line at a privet hedge inconveniently growing directly on the boundary. "What you own is what a surveyor took a transit and a chain and went out there and sunk monuments in your property corners." Transit? Chain? Monuments? There's so much to learn.

Start with a surveyor joke: What does a surveyor say upon seeing Mount Rushmore? Answer: "Well, there's three surveyors, but who's that other guy?" That other guy is Teddy Roosevelt, the only one of the big four who never made his living surveying. The point being that surveying used to be a great way to get your life started: All you needed was a chain (a chain was 1â?"80th of a mile: 66 feet long, 100 links per chain, made of metal), a compass and transit (or some other instrument for accurately measuring angles between objects; the total station is the modern version), and a strong back. After that it was all hiking and trigonometry, and you could make a fine living in a growing country by pacing and setting the boundaries of the land constantly being bought, sold, settled, and connected. In fact, it was one of the true growth industries in a new nation whose greatest resource was almost limitless land.

Talk to a real estate agent or developer for a while and sooner or later he or she will say, "They're not making any more land." But that cliche has become true only in the last century or so. Until then, though new land wasn't being created, new land was constantly being explored, mapped, and usually, in recent centuries, seized from its occupants and made available to European settlers. In fact, the United States was from the outset, and in many ways continues to be to this day, fundamentally a great big land development scheme. "After the Revolutionary War, the United States was poor in everything but land, so real estate development became the chief source of entrepreneurship," Witold Rybczynski wrote in Last Harvest. This applies to Raleigh as much as anywhere, and perhaps a good deal more so, as I learned when I went looking for the history of that little quarter acre on which my particular node on the infrastructure grid stands.

Raleigh's state capitol sits at the top of a slight rise in the terrain, surrounded by a gridwork of streets, largely because an enterprising settler named Joel Lane appears to have gotten some commissioners from the brand-new state of North Carolina drunk enough to buy his property. It's a long story, plausibly true, and beloved by Raleighans. After the Revolution, legislators of the new state needed to plant their capital somewhere that would offend neither the coastal cities in the east nor the Appalachian settlers in the west. The great middle of the state was largely unsettled; Wake County, in 1792, still lacked a town of any description. The local Tuscarora Indians never had a settlement here, and even the European farmers working their way west seem to have found little here of interest: Of the 1,000 acres Lane eventually sold to the state, three- quarters were virgin forest.

With six sites under consideration, including several on the Neuse River, the commissioners remained deadlocked until they spent a night at the home of Lane, who allegedly served them a mixture of bourbon, sugar, and cherries called Cherry...

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Verlag
Rodale Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1605296473
ISBN 13 
9781605296470
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
248
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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