Surveys, Downpours, & Beers

I've been putting in vast amounts of my time trying to compare costs for various data carriers for this project I'm doing. I won't bore you with the technical details, but this stems off of a project that I started working on over the summer, surveying a river valley and the spatial relationships between particular monuments. Neat, eh?

It's a rainy-ish day out and on one of the early days of the survey, which was only about 2 weeks to begin with, it was a little bit cloudy but nothing spectacular. Our biggest goal was to measure the distance across the valley using a total station- so you shoot a beam of light from the machine to a prism which reflects it back, and in the time it takes for the light to travel, the distance is calculated.

But the distance across the valley was pretty damned big. I don't ask any of my team to do anything I haven't done or won't do, so I took my friend's boyfriend's GPS and went with a guide that morning. Upon reaching the top, the battery went dead, and I became extremely unhappy- but... saw that there was a point from which I could plant a prism and take the point without trees in the way.

So when I returned for lunch, I informed said boyfriend that it would be his turn after lunch. One of the students expressed an interest in tagging along on the trip, and since I was shooting, I said sure. He could practice his Spanish, the boyfriend could practice his English, the guide could take some time to walk instead of excavate (which I prefer too) and I could take the point.

But before they left, I noticed the clouds in the sky- we were in the rainy season afterall- and voiced some concerns about the weather. "No, no lluvia. No es una problema." About 15 minutes after they left, and the hike takes about an hour or two up the other side of the ridge, the winds picked up and the clouds descended on us. Our director came booking it up to the site "Pack it in! The skies are about to open up! We're in for a torrential rainstorm!" I got a little uneasy. I'd harangued the boyfriend that morning to not forget the cell phone, specifically for the purpose of dealing with the survey today. We could call him! Tell them to come back down... Unfortunately, their end wasn't getting any reception. One of the supervisors reassured me and said he'd seen the driver take off like a bat out of hell when the winds picked up, and he was likely on his way to pick them up now- because the guide knew, and would bring them back down the ridge immediately.

This might have been the case in an ideal world. About an hour later we were all indoors at one of the lab facilities. Our director going through roll call to make sure that all the field school students were in. There was a long pause at one point. "Um, has anybody seen..." I cringed and slunk into the adjacent lab space of the girl whose boyfriend I had just sent to drown with the student and offered to be slave labor on her current sorting project.

Some 5 hours later - I had stayed late at the lab - I finally went back to our living quarters. The boyfriend and the student were just getting back from the trip, and were drenched- though with mud up to mid torso. I ran to the friend and her boyfriend's room. "um... I'm sorry? Desculpe?" "...take your phone." was the response from the bathroom where he was wringing out his clothing. The student, apparently, had had a blast and was regaling his fellow cohort with tales of the bridge being washed out, tramping through fields, etc. "We called the driver! He didn't pick up! His wife did! she said he was at the bar!" Apparently, when the winds picked up the guide didn't bring them down- he rushed them to the top. Afterwhich point, they finally ventured down- as the lightening bolts were all around them and they were standing at arguably the highest point of a cleared ridge under an itty bitty aluminum roof... but at the bottom, the river had risen by several feet and the bridge was washed out. So they had to find an alternate route- which entailed wading through streams all holding onto the pole for the prism so they didn't get swept away (particularly the guide, he was definitely under 5 feet tall) going several miles out of the way and trespassing through the fields of various farmers. Luckily, the guide they were with knew everyone in the general area, and so they didn't get shot at. At least I could tell my director that I hadn't killed off his student. For the rest of the season, I'm pretty sure that most of the students who went on survey believed that the guide was god.

Beers and dinner were on me.

Partly because of the ordeal- mostly because I was sending them back up the next morning.