What happens to old surveyors?
@flga-pls-2-2
I thought about this when you mentioned you impending retirement.
About 35 years ago I ran a crew for a consultant and our big thing was staking State highway projects. We’d live in cheap hotels, eat Vienna sausages for lunch and drive each other crazy at night. I don’t really remember having ‘fun’ at the time, but I sure have a lot of good memories…
We were way out in western Oklahoma in some Godforsaken little town whose “main street” was the State Highway. We usually made our money by measuring our progress in miles…but this job (technically a Federal Aid Urban Secondary – F.A.U.S.) had curb returns every twenty feet. We were miserable.
The first day we were there kicking up street control and we saw the local minion-of-the-law stopped in the middle of the road. He was escorting this shabby looking old man out of the street and over to the sidewalk. Later the officer came and told us this “crazy” old man wouldn’t stay out of the street. The officer was counting on us to let him know if the old man got back out in the street as they had trouble with him walking down the middle of the road.
It didn’t take a half hour and the old man was back out there. I went out and warned him the police were watching him and he needed to keep out of traffic. The old buzzard looked up at me and recited the station of the P.C. we were standing near where a PK had been placed by the State crews. Then he told me he had driven a railroad spike there right after WWII…Just to humor the old goat we got the pin-finder and a pick and dug down through a half a foot of asphalt, and by God there was a railroad spike.
We wound up in the truck and he told me his story. He had retired from the Highway Department about the time I was in the first grade. And although he was dirty, unkempt and prone to a little delusional rambling, he had a razor sharp memory when it came to all his surveying. I did what any contract surveyor would have done…I issued him a safety vest and noted his name at the top of every page in the field book. He stuck with us every day and even ate lunch with us. He was happy as a lark. The local police had taken note that we were “humoring” him and cautioned us he could be prone to violence. Which BTW I never saw or heard him approach any sort of that behavior. He was definitely addled, but always a friendly guy to us.
About the second or third day a lady pulled her car up next to us all and asked if the old man was “bothering” us. I told her he not only wasn’t bothering us but he was good help. It was his daughter. He lived a couple of blocks off Main Street and she said that she had a heck of a time keeping him home. The neighbors had all complained at one time or another about him rambling about their fences, piling up rocks by the sidewalk and getting angry when they moved the rocks. He apparently was going to keep surveying anything he could.
We finished the initial staking. I remember he was there a couple of times when we returned for some re-staking. He was Johnny-on-the-spot and knew exactly what had been torn out and what had been covered up. And he always had on his vest.
By the time they were painting the white stripes down center line the old man had stopped coming around. The waitress at the cafe said she’d heard he wasn’t well but he hadn’t passed away as far as she knew. We stopped by his house and it seemed like it had been vacant for a while. I never really found out what finally happened to him. We joked about what was going to happen to us when we grew old. 35 years ago it was just a joke…but maybe not so much anymore.
Sooo if you you are ever in Oklahoma and see and an old raggedy man wandering down center line…stop and loan me a vest. 😉
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