KARNS — Wendell Hatmaker, 78, retired from the Knox County surveyor’s office in 2009, and every first week of April since then he has set up his transit in his backyard and shot the northeast corner post of his fence, which comes up three-eighths of an inch east of where it was the year before. The post hasn’t moved. He checked it against the iron pin in the ground, and the pin hasn’t moved either.
He sits in a folding lawn chair to do it, a green webbed one with a cup holder, and each year he sets the chair three-eighths of an inch farther east, so he’s the same distance from the post as he was the first time. There is a pencil mark on the patio slab for every spring. They run six and three-eighths inches now, and his wife, Doris, brings out iced tea partway down.
“I don’t mind it,” Hatmaker said. “I did boundaries for thirty-one years and some of them never would sit still. I’d just like to know which way it’s headed.”
It is headed, by his figuring, for Ray Tolliver’s tomatoes, which grow in a bed just east of the fence. The cages are twenty-two inches from the line. Hatmaker puts the post at the cages sometime around 2068.
Tolliver, 71, said Hatmaker brought the figures over two summers ago and stood at the fence while he read them. “I told him well, Wendell, they’re annuals. And he said he knew that, he meant the bed.” Tolliver has not moved the cages.