Question

For years, Harrison believed the coastline of Oakhaven was not a boundary, but a negotiation. Every Tuesday, regardless of the tide or the sleet, he would march down to the salt marshes with his brass-bound transit and a leather-bound logbook. To the town council, Harrison was an expensive nuisance, an old surveyor who refused to accept that the county lines had been settled in 1892. But to me, his assistant, he was something closer to a 'tide-table with a pulse.' I followed two paces behind him, carrying the cedar tripod, watching how he ignored the encroaching spray of the sea to focus on the alignment of two distant pine crests.

The councilmen frequently argued that Harrison was wasting public funds to map what they termed 'worthless silt.' They saw the marsh as an obstacle to the town's expansion, a muddy expanse that should be drained and paved. Harrison, however, looked at the mud and saw a living document. He would mutely point to the sandbars, showing me how they migrated three inches to the east with every winter gale, as if the land itself were trying to escape our tidy grids. He never explained his methods to the council, nor did he defend his salary. He simply presented his weekly maps—drawings so detailed they captured the ephemeral footprints of plovers—and let the silent ink do the arguing.

I often wondered if Harrison's obsession was less about geography and more about control. In his quiet determination, I saw a man trying to freeze a world that was slipping through his fingers. Yet, standing in the cold spray, watching him carefully record the transient shape of a spit that would disappear by nightfall, I realized his goal was not to arrest the sea, but to honor its mutability. He was not trying to tame the coast; he was acting as its final, faithful biographer.

Based on the passage, the narrator's point of view regarding Harrison's work is best characterized as that of: