The Lie of the Land - a short story

Barry Himmoll, mathematician. A singular gentleman, given to talking to himself on his long strolls. A genius. He had already earned his PhD from Caltech at the age of 21 when most young men were just completing their Bachelor's degrees. His theoretical talents had attracted the attention of the aeronautical industry soon after the war broke out. He had spent most of the war calculating the trajectories of air-launched rockets, working for one of America's largest manufacturers of propellant.

Shortly after the Pacific war ended, his employer transferred him to a new project, based on the East Coast, where he'd find himself working on submarine-launched missiles. Soon, he'd find himself facing the Atlantic, rather than the Pacific. To be more accurate, his new office, and his brand-new bungalow nearby were somewhat inland, but a short enough drive from the shore.

But Barry was disappointed by the lie of the land. The ocean's swell, its roar, he knew. The Atlantic Coastal Plain, however, was flat. There were no distant mountains to gaze upon. His daily walks, accompanied by notepad and mechanical pencil, were spent theorizing the pressing practical problems of rocketry in the form of calculus. With a new dog for companionship, Barry would stroll around his neighborhood, stopping every now and then to jot down some formulae as ideas came to him. 

One bright morning, it had occurred to him while out walking his dog, that having been raised in Oregon and with all of his adult life spent in California, being without a mountainous horizon was something new and almost unsettling for him. He wondered why it must be thus. His regular routes were flat - the walk to the lab - flat. The two dog-walks - flat. Flat meant no new vistas to behold as he rounded a corner, no scenery to admire from afar. And no vantage points from which to survey the land laid out in front.  As a child, he'd gaze up at the Cascade Mountains and wonder about the forests rising to the tree line, remote logging settlements, wooden cabins, smoke rising from chimneys, wolves, snow-covered peaks... Pasadena had a mountain range too; not as high but much closer to hand. Now he'd be sorely missing those sierras and hiking in them.

It bugged him. Barry's mind set to work on the topology and trigonometry of how an ideal landscape of the Atlantic Coastal Plain should look. Even a modest range of hills, he considered, could ripple up to offer some delight, some relief. And between those hills, shallow valleys, guiding rivers toward the ocean... To be able to stand on a ridge and behold another ridge, separated by ten or more miles... 

Day after day, his only choice when setting out from home to walk his dog in the early morning or after work was to turn left or turn right. The road on which he lived was straight and flat - yielding no differential in elevation. Well, maybe one foot's rise in half a mile. Maybe 18 inches. One day, he stopped and put on his driving glasses. Got right down to the ground, then lay down prostrate on the sidewalk, gazing into the distance. Yes - there was a gentle rise ahead, entirely clear. He noted the gatepost marking a high point, then stood up and walked towards it, turned around and looked back. Indeed, he found himself looking down, ever so slightly. One day, at the local library, he perused maps of the area. He'd have to drive 300 miles west towards the Tennessee border to get some glimpses of peaks. But Barry wanted those mountains right here, where he was, not as a weekend destination.

Was it him or was that hump near the crossroads a bit more pronounced today? Changes would be coming. Change is what one wants. With a merrier step he'd set off on his walks. Could it be that he really felt he was walking uphill? One day, he bought himself a pair of war-surplus binoculars in town. Pointless, he thought at first, but then he'd start discerning landmarks along the horizon through them, increasingly clearly. A new way at looking at land. Winter was best - he could see further than in summer when his line of sight was blocked by trees in leaf. With each winter, it seemed to him that the land was indeed - slightly hillier.

Topology and topography. Orthogonal vectors in Riemannian geometry for work, and in daily life the  imagining of 3D maps of the terrain, land forms, twisted, buckled, pulled, pushed, distorted - shapes, forms - all calculable. But the pure math of flat terrain suggested that somehow more varied landscape was an innately desirable characteristic.

Ever so slowly, Barry had subconsciously trained himself to raise the land by willing it to do so - even though he wasn't aware that he was doing so. His shoes would depress low-lying land, pushing it ever so slightly closer to the center of the earth. And when traversing higher ground, it would seem attracted to his body and rise up fractionally to meet it.. Where the land was not inhabited, it would jump an inch or so in height from one second to the next, a move accompanied by a sudden bright flash of a line of light along a forest floor. But no one saw it happen. Where people live on the land, its rise would be gradual, unnoticed.

Yet there was no sign on any maps that the land was rising inexorably; they would redraw themselves as though they were such when they left the printers, with ever-higher contours. If an observer placed any one of these maps of the area under a time-lapse camera for a few years, he would see the numerals '80ft' on a contour line morph into '85ft' then '90ft' then '95ft', leaving not a trace on the paper of their former value. But of course no one locally did that - they weren't even aware that their land was rising gently beneath their feet. Or who was causing it to happen Or what they could really remember about where they lived.

Some places rose more than others, some rose faster than others. Some dips and valleys lost height, as if sucked imperceptibly by the earth's core. Barry never noticed. But as the years passed, he grew familiar with his surroundings, he felt happier there, he felt his mind was - once again - more fertile, more productive, new ideas seemed to spring out, unbidden, one after the other. Mountains became distant memories.

After 20 years of Barry's presence, the difference was distinct - but no one remembered the landscape as it was before he settled there. Maybe it had always been hilly, rolling countryside. Only local folk who had grown up there as children with unusually acute powers of observation, returning after many years' absence would scratch their heads and would say to themselves: "I can't recall it being quite so hilly back then! Maybe it's a trick of memory - maybe my eyesight's not what it once was. Maybe as a kid I never noticed them rises as I ran for the groceries. Now, they tire me." They'd say such things to themselves and then they'd move on to another thought about the old radio store on Main Street or whether the soda fountain used to be on this side or the other side of the road.

And so, after 20 years in his daily routine, walking to work, walking home again, taking his dog for a walk, in the morning, and again after he'd got home, Barry Himmoll felt a personal satisfaction with where he lived and worked; the undulating landscape somehow suited him just as it was. 

As he approached his 50th birthday, he was called in to the personnel department. He was being offered a new and exciting job. A mathematician with his particular skill-set was needed to work on the moonshot project; his employer had won a contract to provide services to NASA. He'd be moving to Texas. Houston. Damn. Flat as a pancake.

[And then full stops start moving themselves around this story.]

This time last year:
A Future Like This

This time two years ago:
Qualia memories: rural Gloucestershire, 1973

This time three years ago:
Lent 2020 - the summing up

This time four years ago:
Strength in numbers

This time seven years ago:
Cultural differences: distance to power

This time 11 years ago:
Painting the Forum Orange

This time 14 years ago:
That's what I like about the North