Eight-Thousand Reasons

For the past several weeks I’ve been confined to the house – a hip replacement slowing me down temporarily.  Aside from being necessary for the betterment of my health and ability to lead a more normal, pain-free life moving forward, this down time has provided me with considerable time to study and write. Here’s one of my personal life-lessons that left me with eight-thousand reasons to reflect and get better.

I was fortunate to get to know and work for a family who needed help marketing their timber. Their property was long and narrow, a near perfect example of a rectangle.  One of the first steps to setting up a timber harvest is establishing harvest boundaries, which often times are the actual property lines.  When flagging and painting property lines that haven’t been surveyed in decades, we do the best we can to find evidence of past markings.  Sometimes these markings can come in the form of old paint, old chop marks, old signs,  or even old flagging.  For anyone that works in the timber business, it’s a great feeling to find an old line or corner that is just shy of being fully reclaimed by the woods – there’s a sense of nostalgia associated with this junction of the past and present.  For a brief moment, overwhelmed with a sense of accomplishment, you feel a connection to those who’ve worked these lands before, the thoughts on the history of a place captivating the imagination.  Often times, though, it has been too long – the wilds of unrestrained nature have erased the visual evidence of parcelization created by  those before us.

A rough copy of the survey highlighting my mistake

In my case, on this specific assignment, there was evidence – old flagging and old posted signs that just happened to coincide with a definitive timber change.  The mistake I made was two-fold.  First, I had somehow gotten off-course as I worked my way from the back of the property forward, the slightest mis-step in degrees when dealing with a line over a mile long, able to have a significant impact on where you end up.  Second, I allowed my traverse to veer off of the original angle because of “evidence” of an “established” line. At the end of the day, I didn’t think twice about the need for a surveyor because I thought I was right; and, the only person who seemed to know I was wrong, a tenant of the adjacent property, neglected to say anything until after the Feller Buncher had dropped every tree up to the line I had flagged. Jordan Lumber, the buyer of the lump-sum, sealed-bid sale, cut right up to the line I had established as anyone would have done – they thought I was right too.  One gentlemen who liked stirring the pot kept pushing for triple stumpage, shouting “timber theft, timber theft, timber theft” to all who would listen. I’ve even heard rumors circulating that it was 17 acres valued at more than $70,000.00.  Thankfully, surveyor Melvin Graham established the correct property line – 6.17 +- acres and over $8,000 later, here we are.

Today, eight-thousand reasons later,  I am a better man for having experienced this trying situation.  The folks that I worked for believing in me, the landowner whose property was affected, his kindness and understanding, inspiring me to get better.  Rather than stump counting the impacted area and making a bad situation worse, Dr. Daley was happy accepting what Jordan had paid per acre for the area included in the sale. This isn’t the only mistake I’ve ever made at work and it certainly won’t be the last.  There have been times when I’ve been over-confident, a little too proud, and hesitant to admit that I’m unsure or that I can’t figure something out.  Nowadays, when I catch myself falling into this trap, I remember my time on Haw Branch Road and the eight-thousand reasons I have to be better.  If a property needs surveying for us to be able to do our job correctly, I recommend it beforehand.  Most importantly, perhaps, is the lesson that humans are fallible, prone to falling short and destined to make mistakes.  At the end of my life, as my mind and body fail, I can only hope that I have used my failures, my journeys down the wrong path as a means to hunt down the best version of myself, the version that God wants to see.

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