Learning to Shut Up

A quick note: The original version of this story was written for the Passing Ships challenge and abandoned because I couldn't find my old survey crew photos. I still haven't found them, but rather than let this go to waste, I dusted it off today and after some inner debate, decided to share it, in the hope that someone gets a kick out of it.

A little bit about younger me:

In the late 70's, I was hired as a member of a four-man survey crew for a natural gas exploration and distribution company. I would end up staying with the company for almost ten years, but a promotion to a position at a new plant in Wyoming would end my stint as a surveyor, or “Field Engineer” as the official title read, after only two years. This is the story of one chance encounter during those first two years and the weird way it changed my perspective. (Did I mention it was the 70's?)

Yes, I was a writer in those days, too. In fact, I would eventually take on an unpaid role as a photojournalist for the company magazine. The corporate career, itself, was a welcome opportunity for a kid who had become a dad at the age of 18 and had every intention of supporting his family. In the long run, it would end up providing a world of adventures and plenty of opportunities to exercise my creative skills along the way. There are countless stories to tell, but I'll get back to this one.

A little bit about the job:

Now, I'm not going to bore you with a short course on how pipeline surveys worked in the pre-GPS world, but a little bit of setup will help you understand what was going on. The Party Chief, aka Boss of the crew and I were doing a preliminary survey to map out a proposed route for an underground gas pipeline, to connect a new well to the gathering system. Put simply, we had to establish the starting and ending points, then, using a transit (basically a telescope with cross-hairs, mounted on a fancy compass), mark the best route from point “A” to point “B” with flags made up of four-foot, sharpened pieces of lath, each with a good length of orange plastic ribbon attached.

Trust me when I say that the description above is a gross oversimplification. Point “A” and point “B” were often many miles apart and probably well-hidden from each other by the terrain. The “straight line” approach often had to be abandoned due to obstacles or potential archaeological finds. Additionally, there were usually a limited number of access roads, and the only way for the “flagger” to cover the route was on foot.

The “instrument man” would set up the transit over one point and line it up with some point established on the route, either the end point or a “P. I.” or Point of Intersection, meaning a turn. Once that line was established, the flagger would walk the route and determine where the next flag should be, then signal the instrument man, who would wave large orange flags to “bring the flagger on line” at which point the flag would be driven and the flagger would move on to the next point. The result, of course was a nice line of pretty orange ribbons that the ditching crew could follow.

Ready? Let's go!

Sounds pretty simple, right? It would be, in a perfect world. This particular day, we were working in the sand hills of Kansas, and there's nothing perfect about that world. We had driven into the starting point on one rise and established a line to a point on another about a mile away, across a valley and two fences. Yours truly loaded up two shoulder bags of laths and went on his merry way across the sage and snake-covered prairie.

After reaching and climbing the far hill, I found a point where the well head to be connected was visible, drove the last flag of that leg and “waved off” my instrument man. That meant he would need to pack up his transit and tripod, load everything in the Suburban, drive back out to the main road, then find the road nearest to the last flag and “make his own road” to the new starting point .

That meant I probably had about an hour to kill. Fortunately, it was a beautiful day and I had a great seat on the edge of the bluff I had just climbed. I dropped my bags, took a long drink from my canteen and sat cross-legged, looking back across the expanse. The sun and the stillness washed over me and I helped myself to a big dose of peace and quiet. I have no idea how long I sat there, thinking about - nothing.

The shit hits the fan.

A sudden blast of warm, moist air slammed into the back of my neck, accompanied by a low, whistling noise. In that moment, I learned what “jumping out of your skin” means. In my mind, can see myself doing just that, in some sort of weird, Wile E. Coyote-style animation.

Somehow, I sprang up and spun around into a crouch, all in one motion. I was ready for anything – until I found my bad self nose to nose with a young pronghorn doe, frozen in place, just as I was.

Neither of us had planned well, but she was definitely the quicker thinker. That spry little minx took one backward leap (I didn't know they could do that and I don't think she did, either.) and put about six feet between us. She turned to the side and eyeballed me for a long moment, defecated, then moved her fluffy butt with the getaway speed her species is known for and disappeared over the opposite edge of the bluff. I just stood there for a minute, wondering how I'd pulled off that cool kung fu move.

Taking it all in:

Needless to say, my Party Chief and I had a good laugh about it while we set up his transit for the next shot, as did the rest of the crew when I told the story at dinner. Later, as the local news droned on from the TV in my motel room, I had a minute to put the whole thing together in my head.

I had been so still and quiet that the little antelope had given in to her curiosity and crept up to take a whiff of the thing on the hill. Pronghorns, like many wild things, will clear their nostrils with a snort just prior to sampling a scent. That's what had startled me, and the rest is comedy history. The interesting thing, though, is how my oblivious state had created the whole scenario.

The weird 70's stuff:

It was one of the rare times in my younger life when I had unconsciously stopped my internal dialogue. It's a subject that's been addressed by philosophers, psychologists and others in numerous texts. As luck would have it, I first heard of it when reading Carlos Castaneda's series of books that started with The Teachings of Don Juan. Wouldn't you just know that a goody-two-shoes kid like I was would get wrapped up in the tales of a peyote-chewing shaman-in-training? Tales which, by the way, turned out to be mostly fabricated?

Regardless of Castaneda's tenuous credibility, there's a reasonable amount of evidence that suggests “clearing your mind” can open doors to new creative pathways, as well as some other, more “far out” experiences. For those of you that know of his books, no, I don't do drugs and I don't go for trips on “the lines of the world” or pass out for days at a time. I have learned, however, that I can stop my internal dialogue.

Easy to preach; hard to practice.

The problem, at least from my perspective, is that it isn't easy to do. I'm always writing in my head. I almost always have a song playing up in there, too. Meanwhile, I'm constantly nagging myself about the next bill that has to be paid, yard work that needs to be done, and so on. Not to mention pondering things like, “What the hell does 'goody-two-shoes' actually mean?”

Anyway, regardless of the importance of shutting down thought processes and inner peace and particle physics and a whole lot of other stuff that's too deep for a shallow mind like mine, that encounter on top of an arid, sunlit sand hill in Kansas was one of the most memorable of my life. I'll wager it was the same for her.