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one of the damndest and creepiest things i’ve seen so far in two+ decades of doing this was the day i started an ALTA on a 35 acre tract about an hour out of town. it was a trailer park, but only about the front third of it- the back had two long storage unit buildings and a big open field (a good bit of which was the septic field for the trailer park).
anyways, as i’m wont to do- i headed straight for the back line/corners. which meant driving to the back of the trailer park, hopping over the chain gate, and huffing it the 12/1500 feet or whatever back to the fenceline. as we get up to within a 100′ or so of the SE corner, there’s a horse just lying there in the grass. WTF is my first thought- damn thing ain’t moving. then i realize it’s not breathing either. then i see a spent 20-gauge shell. then another. then i get up on the horse and it had been blasted right square in the forehead and it was just staring all bug-eyed at us. clearly had been, um, extinguished in the most recent sense.
i really didn’t know what to do. calling the cops didn’t make any sense (really almost never does), as i couldn’t even decide if there was a crime. called the client, he just replied with “that’s weird, i have no idea.” part of me had my eyes trained on the periphery, wondering if some lunatic horse murderer was hiding in the cedars along the fence line. i think 8-10 minutes later i just decided to keep on trucking and we went about working.
couple hours after that, we’d set control, i’d shagged all the boundary, and was drawing and taping in the storage buildings while my helper was shooting in the corners. walked by one of the sliding doors in the middle of one of the storage buildings and there’s this slowly growing puddle of viscous, maroon colored liquid oozing out from under the door. square up looked like blood. like blood that found its way out of the bottom of a rusty barrel after a while. that stopped me dead in my tracks again. and i, of course, immediately wondered if the first thing had anything to do with the second thing, or if it didn’t- or which scenario might be worse. and, of course, i called the client again. he then called the cops. i went about my way again.
30 minutes later or so, see a squad car come rolling through. he didn’t even slow down to ask us anything or appear interested.
at some point i just resigned myself to that being standard operating procedure for out there.
dad worked in the local slaughterhouse when he was in high school, bout the same time. said his job was to separate the whateveritscalled tendony stuff off the sides of the tongue, stuff it in boxes that were destined for the mcdonald’s commissary. that’s what mcdonald’s used to keep their little wafer hamburger patties to stick together.
If possible we would pile up downed limbs and trees over the carcass and burn it. We were close enough to the river swamps that gators and other critters would dispose of a lot of them.
Andy
Had a job that involved mapping an encroachment situation onto State land where a fellow living in a trailer over the course of many years on the adjacent property had been using what they call a ‘honey bucket’ in these parts, basically a 5 gallon bucket lined with a garbage bag, to do his business. When it was full enough I guess, he would drag it over the property line and dump it in a big pile. I wasn’t told the nature of the encroachment, just that there was a massive pile of garbage bags that reeked to high heaven and attracted clouds of flies. Now this task wouldn’t have been so bad had it been frozen, but it was the peak of summer and this guy made no attempt at keeping these bags intact and there was human waste oozing out in every direction. Once I realized what I was mapping and my gagging and watering eyes began to ease up, I got the shots needed coding them in the field book as ‘GPS’ and turned it all over to the drafter who just had to ask, what does GPS stand for.
Giant Pile of Sh……
Willy- Posted by: @williwaw
Had a job that involved mapping an encroachment situation onto State land where a fellow living in a trailer over the course of many years on the adjacent property had been using what they call a ‘honey bucket’ in these parts, basically a 5 gallon bucket lined with a garbage bag, to do his business. When it was full enough I guess, he would drag it over the property line and dump it in a big pile. I wasn’t told the nature of the encroachment, just that there was a massive pile of garbage bags that reeked to high heaven and attracted clouds of flies. Now this task wouldn’t have been so bad had it been frozen, but it was the peak of summer and this guy made no attempt at keeping these bags intact and there was human waste oozing out in every direction. Once I realized what I was mapping and my gagging and watering eyes began to ease up, I got the shots needed coding them in the field book as ‘GPS’ and turned it all over to the drafter who just had to ask, what does GPS stand for.
Giant Pile of Sh……
oh, that reminds me-
not too far along in time one way or another from the horse episode (they were both about 5 years ago), did a couple acre empty tract smack dab in the middle of town here. empty pieces of that size are hens’ teeth anymore in these parts, and, well… they tend to get used by those who ain’t got nothing or nowhere else to use. iow, there was a rather large and elaborate homeless camp at the back of the parcel, which we would only discover after wading through…
the perimeter lines of the tract were lined with about 10-20 feet of cedars. when we pulled up it looked like some kind of post-apocalyptic christmas; all the cedars were “decorated”. and, of course, to get to the corners we had to get through the trees somehow. only when you got up close to the trees could you make out what all the pomp and tinsel actually was- USED toilet paper. from the ground all the way up to the tops of the trees. all we could decide was that it was these dudes’ maginot line against invaders like us or perhaps some rival undomiciled people.
was a delicate dance through there, even when we found the obvious preferred foot paths through. only when we got to the back did we find tent city, and they were none too pleased that we’d made it. i did minimal in the way of diplomacy or explaining. shot our shots, sketched our sketch, and weaved our way back out of dodge.
Had to work a similar tract once. Didn’t find a camp but did find enough stolen bicycles to outfit a class or two in the local elementary school.
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