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| Sunday, September 5, 2010 |
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| Four-Wheel Drive Low - A Survey Nightmare |
Somewhere, east of Del Mar, near San Diego, California, in the broad mesas of coastal sage, there once lay a crushed Covey cooler. However long that monument lasted I do not know, for I never returned to that place where we abandoned it. It is probably in some fill slope by now, pushed aside by the random cut of a grader’s blade, or crushed to cooler oblivion by the ten ton track of a D-9 carving out a new city.
I was a skinny, ungainly boy then, college-taught and college-dumb, thrashing through brush in bell bottoms and Adidas, the rod with triple prism flailing ahead, the wild buckwheat gathering in my long hair and accumulating down my sweating back. I was perpetually ready to quit.
Dave Gaylord was his father’s chief of party. Bates Drucker was his chainman, an affable soul as ever there was, who could make the string of a Gammon Reel look like a photograph in the vertical crosshair of a T-2. And I, I was the odd man out, the keeper of notes, the cruncher of numbers, the carrier of tripods, the pounder of pipes and, as I shall tell the opener of gates.
It must have been a June or July day, because of the fog. North was anybody’s guess. We were doing a private survey of a pie-shaped piece of land, possibly a holding next to an old rancho boundary. The mesa deceived us at every turn with its crisscrossing farm roads and old, haphazard range fences. Frustrated at finding neither an initial point nor a practicable road, Dave suddenly cut through the brush blazing his own trail, the front chassis of the stocky, heavily armored two-ton International truck, our state-of-the-art surveying equipment rolling around in its back, flattening a continuous six foot high chamise and sage forest. The wide wheels plowed forward under the irresistible torque of four-wheel drive low. I ran ahead, cutting back and forth between narrow paths in the brush, signaling the driver with a wad of pink flagging draped around the top of a four-foot lath. Bates ran yet ahead of me with another flagged lath in a frantic attempt to find a connection with an existing road. The dry brush collapsed in loud cracks and snaps under the thick engine plate, the chewed remains extending in a twisted swath that disappeared behind us into the fog. The driver grinned fatuously from behind his protective windshield as the forested mesa yielded before him.
Keep an eye out for survey corners! I’m comin’ through!” he screamed out the window.
We had proceeded some half-mile in this fashion, making questionable progress across the mesa, when I chanced upon a corner. Set deep into the brush, it would be impossible to measure without considerable clearing. We thrashed laboriously with a pair of dull brush axes, making little headway against the springy chamise that was neither thin enough to spread with our hands nor thick enough to cut cleanly. Dave was still behind the throttle, lumbering the aging International headlong into our partially brushed path. The engine plate acted like a great clothes ringer, squeezing the brush between it and the ground beneath. The wheels spun into little blue clouds that smelled of rubber and burning brush.
One final eight-foot challenge remained between the corner and us. Unable to back away for a faster run, Dave gunned the engine to build maximum momentum. The grill crashed into a tree of spreading 3-inch trunks, heaving them down while upturning a mass of roots over which the engine plate scraped and screeched. Once beyond the engine plate, the root ball sprang away from the earth to slam against the engine block, severing the clutch cable with its broad swipe. The engine coughed and spit, staggering a few more feet before choking in a pall of dust swirling around the cab.
Inside the cab Dave Gaylord's foot pressed on the clutch pedal, now moving against him with zero resistance. He smiled briefly, then turned the ignition key. The rig shuddered forward, then backward, a tiny distance. It was a good try, the kind of thing you can do with a low-torque VW Bug but not a four thousand pound International truck locked in four-wheel drive. Four-wheel drive low. We pushed from behind while the ignition arced vainly to force the wheels into motion. But the inertia was too great. The wheels rested in four little grooves carved into the soft dirt.
The sun began to peek above the slowly dissolving fog. I was covered in a fine layer of dark, organic dirt mixed with a thousand tiny green stems of chamise. I stared at the Covey cooler. It was time for a drink.
(to be continued)
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By Robert L. McComb
Robert L. McComb is a registered surveyor with a private practice near San Diego, California. |
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