PLSO The Oregon Surveyor Sept/Oct 2020

9 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon |  www.plso.org Featured Article By Mike Berry, PLS My 1978 Epiphany In the spring of 1978, I was a chainman working for the firm of George Cook En - gineering and Surveying in Bend, Oregon. Having graduated the year before from Central Oregon Community College with a two-year Forest Technology degree, I had worked the two previous summers on a Malheur National Forest “P-Line” road survey crew at Allison Guard Sta- tion northwest of Burns, Oregon. The realization had hit me that surveying, not forestry, was going to be my life’s pas- sion. In the fall of 1977, my friend Mike Pulzone, PLS, was working for Cook and told me that they were hiring a chain- man. “Hot damn!” I thought. Real survey work. The big time. I got the job and re- turned to Bend in September 1977 to work for Cook. Bend was experiencing yet another boom at that time and the majority of our work was surveying new “sagebrush subdivisions” on the outskirts of town. Oc- casionally we would do a few “mortgage surveys” along with boundary retrace- ments in some of the old plats in town. On this particular spring day in 1978, we were finding or setting the corners for a lot within the 1910 plat of “Park Addition to Bend.” We had found three of the lot’s four corners, which were all rebars set in more recent surveys. This missing corner was along a curve in the road right-of- way and fell in the gravel parking lot of an old neighborhood grocery store. We found another rebar at the next corner along the curve and then chained in the two chord distances to give ourselves a search area for our missing corner. Mike told me to bring the pin finder over and buzz around for a rebar. I swept over the area but not a peep emitted from the headphones. Mike took over the search to no avail. Obviously no iron had been set at this corner so we would need to calc it up and set a rebar. I was surprised when he said, “Let’s peel the gravel off and see what’s below.” In my seven months of “real” survey work I’d searched for a lot of corners and if they made the pin finder sing then we tied them. If the pin finder was mute, then we had to set a new rebar. Easy as that. It was Friday, getting close to quitting time, I was 21 years old, and happy hour was about to begin at Jake’s Copper Room with half- priced drinks and free steamer clams. Had Mike gone daft? The pin finder did not lie. Let’s head to the office. To my chagrin we scraped off a couple inches of gravel and exposed the under- lying hard-as-concrete packed dirt. We re-chained the two distances to intersect an X in the dirt and then Mike took the side of the shovel blade and started sur- gically scraping off quarter-inch layers of dirt. I’m rolling my eyes like a teenage girl watching her parents dance at a cousin’s Photo 1: Typical examples of John Eaton’s work in Deschutes County. continues on page 10 T Vampire Cemetery —Or— A Retracement of a Portion of the 1904 Plat of Laidlaw in Deschutes County Oregon