If Dominy harbored a lifelong grudge, it was against engineers. Away from their drafting tables, he thought, engineers could be inexcusably stupid. On the other hand, they had a mystical ability to erect huge structures along exact lines, using bizarre formulas he could not even read. They could map a river basin, analyze some abutment rocks, measure the streamflow, and build a dam of precisely the shape, size, and structure to suit it. They had labored through the trigonometry, the calculus, the chemistry, the topology, and the geology that he had backed away from—the one time in his life he
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