In my first five years as a young surveyor, I had the privilege of working with a PLS who was maybe ten years older than me and really showed me the ropes. While most of my mentoring came at the hands of two or three other senior surveyors, it was this guy who taught me how field hierarchy works. I had a wise friend who more than once said that “no one is completely useless, they can always serve as a bad example.” This LS and party chief, who I will call Shinbok, fits that category.
Here are a few of the more memorable experiences I shared with him as I slowly grew into a surveyor. I offer these as cautionary tales — sort of a “Don’t do this” guidebook.
My company excelled at staking mining claims. No terrain was too steep, and no weather was too miserable. We would have a Bell Jet Ranger take each staker to the highest point of the line of claims and drop us off with our backpack of claim posts, a shovel, all the aluminum tags and a rod with a triple prism. We would then navigate downhill with a compass, trying to stay on line and the instrument man, often a mile or more away on some peak, would stop us when we crossed his line. Shinbok was most often the man behind the gun. He would constantly let his rodman get too far down the steep mountainside because he was sitting in the truck eating sunflower seeds instead of standing by the instrument. Lesson No. 1: Be the Instrument man.
The low person on the pecking order, sometimes me, used to dread working with Shinbok on out-of-town projects. We were always getting home at midnight from some job up near Wildhorse because of a 3-hour detour to check traps or because we had to swing by a junkyard in Austin, or some old friend had a hemi engine for sale down in Ely. My company did not pay for travel time on the return trip from the project site, so the chainman always got to ride along for free. Lesson No. 2: Be the driver.
Shinbok once got caught trying to exit at the main gate at China Lake Naval Weapons Center, one of the most secure military bases in the world, with a 4′ diameter obsidian ball that he found while we were on the base surveying geothermal facilities. He directed three of us to toss the shiny black boulder in the back of the survey truck and then assumed the gate guard would wave us through like he always did. This time the guard decided to inspect the truck. Naval Security was very upset. We, escorted by armed MPs, had to turn around and drive back to the exact spot where the rock came from, twenty miles into the desert, and put it back. Then they called our boss. He told them to arrest us. Lesson No. 3: the Sizzler in Ridgecrest, California only stays open until 9 PM.
The great and powerful Shinbok once got a truck so stuck in the mud in Dixie Valley, (100 miles from Reno, way out in the desert), that it took two weeks of attempts to get it out. In the meantime, all the valuable equipment had to be portaged from the sunken vessel to the dry land in an increasingly miserable series of trips. Lesson No. 4a: a fully loaded ¾ ton four-wheel drive truck does not float. Lesson No. 4b: feign a back injury so as not to get ‘shovel duty’.
My hero once slope-staked the entire dam, both toes, at the future Southfork Reservoir, but he did it incorrectly. It turns out he did not know how to slope stake. My future father-in-law who was a retired NDOT engineer serving as Inspector on the project, and I restaked it correctly on the next weekend. Shinbok had been an LS for 15 years by this point. Lesson No. 5: Marry the inspector’s daughter.
And finally, while setting traverse control for a topo of the main entrance road of the ‘under construction’ state park at Southfork Reservoir, Shinbok got sidetracked when he discovered an old wrecked ’52 Chevy in a drainage ditch 50 yards off the road. The topo crew, led by me, who was by now a junior party chief, caught up to him. We had to stand around and wait until he was done removing the headers from the upside down junker and could get back to setting the next control point so that we could proceed with the cross sections. It was a sunny January day with the temperature of 15 below and a foot of snow frozen to the ground. Lesson No. 5. Transfer to the Reno office.