"'Twas not too many years before the War,— what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding, and ultimately meaningless,— we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence."
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Line 23 Vulgarized:
"Not too long before the Revolutionary War, the group of us headed out into the wilderness to engage in scientific surveying which I, a humble religious man, could not comprehend. We were drawing a perfectly straight border, from east to west, through the country, eight yards wide, to ultimately end a British border dispute between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. The Proprietorships overlapped in the original descriptions of their land holdings (along with three counties in Delaware owned by the Penn family) which resulted in some lawsuits. Eventually the border was renegotiated and Mason and Dixon were hired to lay it out and mark it with crownstones."
Subtext:
It's possible the eight-yard-wide line represents the gulf separating the Proprietorships of 1786 and 1990. In a way, what nearly any man does, whether brave or cowardly or scientific or religious, ultimately becomes meaningless in the yawning expanse of time and history. In the end, all mankind's efforts at civilization is an eight-yard-wide line through the wilderness that will eventually simply be overgrown when man ignores the required maintenance simply because he's turned his gaze toward something else.
Cherrycoke's confession that what they were doing was "beyond my understanding" is all of our confession. Do we ever know our purpose, or if we think we do, does it ultimately even matter? We wind up where we wind up due to chance and opportunity and perception and accident. We can lie to ourselves that we understand how we got there. Or we can admit, like Cherrycoke, that it's all meaningless and unknowable.
Cherrycoke's description of their location as the Wilderness is almost certainly a reference to Jesus in the Wilderness when he was tempted by Satan. For them, they were on a scientific journey while Jesus was on a journey of faith. Cherrycoke might be suggesting that even the pursuit of science is a leap of faith for mankind, a journey into the unknown with the belief that they will emerge on the other side more knowledgeable, maybe more in control. They are battling ignorance just as Jesus battled temptation.
In the previous paragraph, Cherrycoke mentions how they topped the Allegheny Ridge to look out over the meadows of Ohio Country stretched out to the Horizon. Could this be reference to the devil taking Jesus to the "exceedingly high mountain" to show him all the glory of the world? Could Cherrycoke be equating science to the devil's temptation of Jesus, leading man astray toward ultimately meaningless work? We cannot forget that the narrator of a large portion of this book is a Reverend.
I guess I should mention the fact that their work, according to Cherrycoke, was "nullified by the War for Independence" because it wasn't. The border they surveyed is still the border today, having been finished by another survey team later (because Mason & Dixon were interrupted by Native Americans) and "re-surveyed" two more times since then (I believe) with no major changes (if any. I'm not a border scholar!). So while Cherrycoke states that what they did was meaningless, and might have seemed meaningless, perhaps we're supposed to see the irony of this and realize, "Hey! What we do isn't meaningless even if it's lost in the context of time and history." Perhaps what we're looking at, in terms of meaninglessness, depends on scale. Historically, sure, most of what we do will be meaninglessness and disappear like a statue in a desert. But presently, how we treat each other, the kindnesses we show, the paths we choose to follow because of our innate curiosity and queer passions . . . those things mean everything. It's all we have and, ultimately, all we are. We're all cutting our own straight line, eight or so yards wide, through the heart of the Wilderness.
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