PLSO The Oregon Surveyor July/August 2021

10 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 44, No. 4 Member Spotlight continued T After more than a decade, the family fi - nally got permission to move to the U.S. Hoekstra’s father researched his options and chose Oregon for what seemed like a bright future at the time. “And his opinion was that the climate was somewhat sim- ilar to the climate in the Netherlands, so that’s what we picked,” he says. Hoekstra was 16. That introduction to trig- onometry the year before proved to be the push for him to think about things in a logical way. He discovered an interest in how the original land surveyors did things and why they did them. “The other thing that is really interesting about it is that you can find a field survey by somebody that surveyed a section really carefully in the 1960s or 1970s who took sun shots and that work is still just as good today as it was 50 years ago. Working with data that was gathered by people that have since gone gives you a sense of being part of a bigger thing.” In an interesting twist, by the time Hoekstra planned to resign from his Corps of Engi- neers position, his mother had obtained a two-year degree in surveying, following in his footsteps. Hoekstra encouraged her to apply for his position, which she did, and she got the job. “She liked the job and re- tired when she was 72,” Hoekstra says. Today, Statewide Land Surveying does pri- marily boundary research and writing legal descriptions, along with hydro surveying and work in the woods for timber compa- nies and the U.S. Forest Service. Although he doesn’t do a lot of GPS work anymore, he still works with a lot of GPS data. “I still like that quite a bit,” he says. “We also do control surveying and tunnel surveying. Right now, we’re doing a bunch of construc- tion surveys for solar farms. We do quite a variety of work which I enjoy.” In addition to his increasing workload, Hoekstra keeps himself busy with a hob- by that he spends a significant amount of time on: He’s a tournament bridge play- er, which he’s been playing since 1970. In normal years, Hoekstra would travel to at least six and sometimes more tournaments around the country, but COVID squashed that and the tournaments were held online, which, he says, is more convenient but not as satisfying. In tournament bridge, there are several levels that players can achieve based on earned points. Hoekstra is an Em- erald Life Master, with only twomore levels above him. He surmises he’s about a year away from achieving the level of Platinum Dan and his wife, Faith Yang, and his mother-in-law in 1982 on the Portland waterfront. Dan hiking in Tillamook.