A Final Thought: Returning to the POB
By Mitch Allen
This past weekend when my wife was searching for Christmas decorations in our cedar chest, she found my father’s old jewelry box, which I hadn’t opened since he passed away five years ago.
In 1968, Dad quit his job at the Georgia Power Company because the company did not give him his 10-year service pin on time nor with the customary pomp and circumstance. His boss just tossed it on his desk. Dad took the slight as an insult to his character.
The next couple of years were hard for our family as we returned to Phenix City, Alabama, and my father worked to start a new career. After failing the State Board exam twice, he finally passed it in 1971, earning his land surveying license. He went on to launch a successful civil engineering firm.
I don’t know what would have become of my brother and me if my father had not cleaned out his desk at the Georgia Power Company that day. Most of the life lessons we learned came during summers and on weekends when we’d survey with Dad in the days before global positioning systems (GPS)—cutting lines, turning angles and chaining through the woods of East Alabama and West Georgia, across swamps and down rows of faded shotgun houses, each of us with a bush hook over our shoulder, fiberglass snake leggings on our calves, and a plumb bob on our right hip like we were Wild West gunslingers.
The lessons included the importance of hard work. Cutting a line by hand with a bush hook in 98 degrees and 90% humidity may sound like madness, but we didn’t know any better. We just drank a lot of water and kept on cutting because the cutting had to get done.
And the importance of accuracy. When you’re surveying, you start and end at the same point to enclose the property. It’s called the “point of beginning” (POB) and the goal is always to return exactly to the POB. If you chained the distances and turned the angles precisely, the starting and ending points will be the same on the plat, within reason.
And respect for private property. We had to cut a lot of bushes and trees so Dad could see down the line when he looked through his transit, and woe to him who cut down a tree—even a small one—that was not on the line, especially if it were on the adjacent property, meaning not our client’s. Dad was a stickler for private property rights as well as land surveying, a profession he was proud to share with people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Lewis and Clark, and our own Moses Cleaveland, who founded the city of Cleveland.
In fact, my father’s headstone, which lies flat on the ground in a small family cemetery surrounded by a cow pasture in Hatchechubbee, Alabama, features a simple epitaph: “He has returned to the POB.”
That’s what Dad wanted.
Anyway, that 10-year service pin—the one that altered the course of our lives—was in his jewelry box. The picture you see here is a little blurry, but the memories are not.
