Maren’s mother had taught her the first rule of surveying: the land doesn’t care what your map says.
This was in the kitchen of the house on Fenwick Road, which had been thirty meters from the cliff edge when Maren was born and was now eleven. Her mother had unrolled a chart on the table — Ordnance Survey, 1:25,000, Sheet 169 — and pointed to a dotted line that ran along the coast like a row of ellipses at the end of an unfinished sentence.
“That’s where the edge was in 1982,” she’d said. “Where is it now?”
Maren, who was eight, had looked at the kitchen window. Beyond the glass, the garden ended in a low fence, and beyond the fence was sky.
“Closer,” she’d said.
“Every year,” her mother had replied. “About a meter and a half. Sometimes more after a storm. The Ordnance Survey will update the map eventually, but between the survey and the printing, the land will have moved again. Every map of this coast is a photograph of something that’s already gone.”
Maren had not become a surveyor because of this conversation. She had become a surveyor because she was good at trigonometry and liked being outside. But she thought about it now — standing on the cliff path at Covehithe with a total station on its tripod, shooting bearings to a series of stakes that Andrew had hammered into the clay — because three of yesterday’s stakes were gone. Not displaced. Gone. The cliff had taken them in the night, along with roughly two meters of Suffolk.
“Fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen,” Andrew called from down the path, checking his notebook. “I can re-set them.”
“Where?”
He looked at her.
“Where do you put them?” she said. “Two meters back from where they were? Then they’re not measuring the same line.”
“They’re measuring where the edge is now.”
“The project brief says we’re measuring retreat rate. You can’t measure rate without a fixed reference. If we keep moving the baseline—”
“Maren. I know what a baseline is.”
She adjusted the total station, sighting along the new cliff face. The break was clean — a vertical shear where the clay had simply detached and dropped. She could see the stratigraphy in the exposed face: brown topsoil, grey boulder clay, a seam of sand, then more clay down to the beach. Twelve thousand years of glacial deposit, give or take. Exposed in one night, and the sea would have it dissolved and redistributed within a month.
She shot the bearing. Recorded the distance. Moved to the next point.
The problem with coastal surveying — the thing they didn’t tell you in the degree program, where the land was always a stable datum — was that you were measuring something that existed in a permanent state of becoming something else. Every reading was true at the instant you took it and false by the time you wrote it down. Not metaphorically false. Literally. The cliff was calving in real time, microscopic grains loosening with every wave impact, every frost cycle, every day of rain saturating the clay until its own weight became a betrayal.
She’d explained this to David once, at dinner, and he’d said, “So it’s like the stock market,” which she supposed was close enough, for David.
“Got seventeen re-set,” Andrew called. “And I found sixteen. It’s on the beach.”
“In how many pieces?”
“Two. Want it?”
“Leave it.”
She finished the morning’s shots and sat on a bench that the National Trust had placed at a scenic viewpoint. The bench had a small plaque: In memory of Arthur Gooding, who loved this view, 1932-2011. The bench was now one and a half meters from the cliff edge. In Arthur Gooding’s day it would have been five or six. Eventually someone would move it or the cliff would take it, and Arthur Gooding’s memorial would join the shingle at the base of the cliff, which would then migrate south along the coast toward Southwold, where it would build up the beach that protected the pier, which is to say Arthur Gooding would in death become the structural foundation for an amusement arcade and a fish and chip shop, which Maren thought he might not have minded, depending on what sort of man he was.
Andrew sat beside her. He had the sandwiches. They ate in the way of people who work outdoors — quickly, perfunctorily, as fuel rather than occasion.
“How far back this month?” he asked.
“I’ll run the numbers tonight. But eyeballing it — two, two and a half meters in the north section. Maybe one and a half south of the church.”
“The church is going to go.”
“Not this year.”
“No. But soon.”
All Souls’ Church, Covehithe, had been falling into the sea in stages for as long as anyone had surveyed it. The tower was a ruin inside a ruin — a smaller church built within the shell of a medieval one that the parish could no longer afford to maintain. The graveyard had already lost its eastern edge. Bones emerged from the cliff face sometimes, after storms. Tudor bones, medieval bones, appearing from the clay like the land was coughing up what it couldn’t digest.
Maren had mapped the graveyard in her first year on the project. She’d used differential GPS, which was accurate to about two centimeters under good conditions. She’d logged every visible headstone, the church walls, the path, the gate. She’d produced a beautiful map — clean lines, precise dimensions, labels in Helvetica because her supervisor at the time had strong feelings about typefaces.
Fourteen months later, seven of her headstones were gone. The path terminated in air. The eastern church wall was partly exposed in cross-section, like a diagram in an architecture textbook: flint rubble core, lime mortar, a cavity where a window had been. She’d stood at the new edge and looked down and seen, forty feet below on the beach, a piece of carved stone that might have been a font or a finial, already furred with seaweed.
She’d updated the map. And then updated it again six months later. And again. She was on version nine now, and each version was smaller than the last, the solid lines of the church and graveyard retreating westward while the cliff edge advanced like a slow tide that never went out.
Her mother would have understood.
What Maren had not told anyone, because it was not the kind of thing you said to the Environment Agency when they were funding your cliff monitoring programme, was that she had started to find the process beautiful. Not the destruction — she wasn’t a nihilist, and the loss of the church was genuinely sad in the way that the loss of any old thing was sad. But the process. The honest, relentless, indifferent process of the sea removing the land, grain by grain, storm by storm, and the patient, equally relentless process of her measuring the removal.
There was something clean about it. The sea didn’t negotiate. It didn’t pause for listed building consent or heritage impact assessments. It didn’t care that All Souls’ had a grade-one listing or that the parish council had written letters. It just came, twice a day, and took what the geology would give it.
And she measured. Twice a year — sometimes four times, if they got the funding — she and Andrew came to this stretch of coast and recorded exactly what had been lost since the last visit. They drove their stakes and shot their bearings and drew their lines, and the lines were always wrong, and they came back and drew them again, and they were wrong again, and this was the work. This was the whole work.
She finished her sandwich. Brushed crumbs from her fleece. Stood up.
“Afternoon session,” she said. “South of the church.”
“Right.”
They packed the equipment. The total station went into its case, the tripod over Andrew’s shoulder, the stakes in a bundle under Maren’s arm. They walked south along the cliff path, which itself had been re-routed twice in the five years she’d been on the project.
The afternoon was warm for November. The sea was calm — deceptively so, the kind of flat grey stillness that didn’t look like it could eat anything but would, given time, eat everything. Maren set up the tripod at the south benchmark, a brass disc set in concrete that the Ordnance Survey had placed in 1994. It was surveyed to six decimal places of latitude and longitude. It was accurate to within a centimeter of its true position on the surface of the earth. In perhaps eight years, it would be on the beach.
She leveled the instrument. Sighted the first stake. Pressed the button.
The number appeared on the screen: a distance, an angle, a position in space, true at this instant, already beginning to be wrong.
She recorded it anyway.