I’d been documenting those markings for months, but I’d never actually seen anyone making them in the field. Following strands of high-capacity fiber optic cable led me to Atlanta, to the rodeo, in search of another thread that might connect the people marking that cable with the ones who built multi-billion dollar industries on top of them.

* * *

Well, I didn’t follow it to Atlanta exactly. The actual competition was held on the University of West Georgia campus, while the expo prior to the rodeo was at the Atlanta Airport Marriott, a strange placeless fiefdom just outside the sprawling citadel that is Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. It was in this theater that my crash course in the locating industry began.

The life cycle of a utility locate—a “locator” is the person, a “locate” is the place—looks something like this: A property owner (either public, like a municipality, or private, like a homeowner) realizes they need to do some construction work that will require digging up a street, field, or lawn. They call 811 and inform their state’s “one-call center” that there’s going to be some digging over by Broad and Somerset.

The dispatchers at 811 send this information to the utility companies, who send either in-house locators or a locator working for a private contractor to Broad and Somerset. Using technology that locators will very defensively tell you is nothing like a dowsing rod (it isn’t, though kind of in the same way that alchemy isn’t exactly chemistry), they verify and mark off where the utilities are buried, either with spray paint or small flags. This video explains it well (or, at least, with a thrilling soundtrack).

Most of the locating equipment we saw in the field didn’t really look like dowsing rods. They usually involve two pieces of equipment. One piece looks like a cross between a defibrillator and a handheld vacuum. It’s called the transmitter case. This part connects a ground stake to a transformer or cable box, applying a signal to the pipe or cable being located. The other looks kind of like a metal detector combined with a leafblower, except instead of letting out air it emits various electronic yelps and hums that reflect the strength of that signal—and therefore the location of that conduit.

It’s fascinating technology, and as the manufacturers sponsoring the rodeo were quick to tell us, it’s only getting better. (While the SPX Radiodetection RD8000 was probably the most popular model at the rodeo—perhaps because the largest contractor in the business has been buying them like crazy—I have a purely aesthetic affection for the Vivax-Metrotech models. They make way cooler sounds.)

Old-timer locators are at times dismissive of the growing “bells and whistles,” insisting that the best locating equipment are your eyes and brain. Locators are experts in the minutiae of landscape. Variations in strains or color of grass and cracks in pavement can offer as much insight as a device equipped with Bluetooth or elaborate touch-screen interfaces.