Field Notes Insert

You arrive at a site before you have decided what matters about it yet. Thirty-two visit records exist for that moment: a fixed place to note where you were and what the site looked like before anything on it changed. Writing that first, before the working part of the visit begins, is the entire point of a separate record instead of a blank page.

A hundred and twenty-two pages of five-millimetre graph paper follow, for the sketch a visit record has no room for, or a measurement that needs a grid rather than a line to sit against. Graph paper does two jobs a ruled page cannot. It holds a rough plan to scale well enough to be useful later. It keeps a column of numbers lined up without a table drawn around it.

I have come back from a site with pages of measurements and no sketch of where any of them were taken. I spent an afternoon later trying to remember which wall a number belonged to. A grid costs nothing at the time and saves exactly that afternoon. It does not, on its own, make the visit any less muddy while you are standing in it.