2001 was a big year for me: I quit a fundamentalist Christian cult and adopted new beliefs about the eternal, moved from the Midwest to Colorado, divorced one woman and married another, and quit actual land surveying and took up writing about land surveying and infrastructure. Assessing these big life changes 23 years later I find that I am now:
Coming back around to the Jesus way.
Still living in Colorado (though I moved away for a while).
Have no wife at all.
And, most relevantly to this column, am working as a land surveyor again! Or more accurately, doing survey field work two or three days a week—it’s been a crazy couple of decades, and being back in the field again feels like coming home.
You see, I never didn’t miss being a land surveyor.
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I have a poor sense of direction, am not particularly good at reading maps, and my handwriting and sketches resemble the efforts of a five-year old… so I was never going to be anything like a natural at surveying, and of course the other land surveyors have always made fun of me at times. Nevertheless, I did turn out to be a pretty good—and occasionally excellent—practitioner of this profession of ours, the noblest of trades.
For at least a couple of reasons:
It turned out that I possessed an unexpected flair for all things Autodesk, valuable indeed in the late 80’s when I found my vocation at a small firm in Atascadero CA. For one thing, this meant I didn’t have to embarrass myself or my mentor with clumsy attempts at hand drafting plats, which would have ended my nascent career. Instead, I merely had to obsessively read hardbound manuals (remember those?) and figure out to make a pen plotter dance. For another, discovering that I had the mindset necessary to code in AutoLISP (and later, HP RPL and Visual Basic) made me extremely employable.
More importantly, and even though I’m bad at reading maps and knowing where north is, I did qualify for the ‘spatial Olympics’ in one important respect; when it came to parsing boundary law, field investigation, and historical research to restore boundaries I was a wizard, good enough to specialize in cadastral surveying just about everywhere I worked.
It didn’t hurt that I was good at taking tests. I passed the LSIT and LS exams at my earliest opportunity, on my first try. And that’s when my love of certification began…
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It’s been an interesting and rewarding career that has taken me to some interesting job sites, including a day at Kachemak Selo, a tiny “Russian Old Believer” community on the Kenai Peninsula; two weeks shooting topo along Highway One on the Big Sur Coast; a week doing construction and topographic survey work at a fundamentalist cult complex in upstate New York; surface-supply diving in the brownly opaque Mississippi doing bathymetric surveying; a San Diego beach alongside bikini clad volleyball players; and just a week ago a day spent on a four-wheeler performing a volume survey of a Colorado mountain lake (& reservoir) that had been allowed to drain, more or less to enable our work… and the whole crew was allowed to scoop up the many rainbow and brook trout left stranded in shallow water. Best ratio of ‘fish caught per minute’ I’ve ever experienced.
And the jobs themselves, the building blocks of a modern mensore’s career, have been varied and interesting, and occasionally dangerous:
Rodman at a ‘mom and pop’ firm in Atascadero CA. On a whim I applied immediately to take the LSIT exam, and I crushed it. Then came the 80s real estate crash…
CalTrans was hiring, and I interview well, so I managed to jump ship and keep surveying through the crash. I was on a field crew and here was where an element of danger entered the picture: surveying and maintaining California highways is (or was at the time at least) one of the two or three easiest ways to get killed on the job in the Golden State. Possession of an LSIT certificate made me practically royalty at CalTrans, and my wife sure liked me having a government job, but I couldn’t stick it out—too much government nonsense, a fair measure of gold bricking and, turns out, I’m a bit of a libertarian. Anyway, I engineered a family move to rural Idaho, for no good reason, to get out of working for the State, and considered myself lucky; had it been necessary, I would have chewed off a limb to escape that trap.
Worked for another small firm in American Falls ID, one license, three of us in the field. Got some great some stories out of this juncture in my career… and that’s all I’ll say.
Brief interlude as an Autodesk VAR; IYKYK.
Moved to Kentucky abruptly—my dad had a massive stroke, and needs must—and, requiring a job in a hurry, I ended up with a survey crew working throughout the South on high-pressure gas lines, mostly. A four-man crew doing ’12 12s’, that is, twelve-day swings of 12-hour days. Finding gas lines, profiling them, and occasionally diving in muddy swamps and rivers to cover exposed lines with concrete bags. More risky business here, incidentally; this diving was in no sense OSHA-approved and I have a recreational, not a commercial, diving license. Looking back, I’m kinda surprised I didn’t die, or at least get a fine or something.
Moved again, don’t ask, from Beaver Dam Kentucky to Beaver Dam Wisconsin (one dam town after another) where I ended up at a nine-office ENR 400 consulting firm as ‘survey manager’—I started calling myself, and nobody stopped me. Got my license here and stamped a lot of maps in Dodge and Washington counties. No complaints yet, touch wood.
A quarter of a century passes while I fritter my life away as a freelance writer…
Moved again, couple of times, and now here I am in Colorado, at a small firm, pushing a GNSS rover around and making my new boss a little crazy because I should know a thing or two about surveying by now, but sometimes I don’t seem to…
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Mostly due to the whole ‘directional dyslexia’ thing, I was never all that great at actual fieldwork and leapfrogged from rodman to office surveyor without ever having the honor of being a crew chief. So yes, it is richly ironic that my return to land surveying is, so far, primarily as a rodman and a crew chief, since one-man crew is the standard at this small, GNSS-enabled firm. But awesome too, and richly rewarding, for simply being in the field searching for corners or pounding rebar has felt to me like an unearned late life gift.
‘Unearned’ because I didn’t have to leave surveying; had I been smarter and more appreciative of my privilege I might simply have kept up with my fees and CEUs to keep my license current, or even sought reciprocity in Colorado. Instead, I let it all slip away though I kept the honorific ‘L.S.’ behind my name for several years until a former colleague called me out on it (‘sup Matt?) and I began to refer to myself as a former land surveyor. That was a mistake, and I suppose this column is a cautionary tale for young surveyors and an elegy for my career that could have been.
Land surveyors belong to the world’s most exclusive club, composed of the best sort of people doing the coolest and most important work. This is Cosa Nostra, that is our thing, and it’s special. If you have been lucky enough to tapped for membership… don’t laugh it off.
Angus Stocking is a former licensed land surveyor who has been writing about infrastructure since 2002.