My Second Day On The Wanapum Team

 The next morning I was assigned to a different crew.  

It was, counting me, a three-man crew.  

The crew chief was named Jerry.  

The head chainman was named Jerry also.  

I was the rear chainman/rodman.  

The Jerry and Jerry crew was running levels on a traverse down the railroad track from Moses Coulee to Rock Island Dam.  

A traverse is an imaginary line on the earth’s surface that can be located exactly on a map. 

Such a line, once established could be used for a variety of useful functions.  

A traverse was created by taking a distance and angle offset from a previously established point on the earth’s surface. 

This created a known and locatable starting point. 

The traverse extended from that starting point with distance and angle offsets from the starting point. 

 Crews measured distances by using a “chain”.  

A “chain” was a steel device roughly half the dimensions of the metal strapping on bundles of lumber.

“Chains” came in two lengths, one hundred feet or three hundred feet.  

They had feet and tenths of feet embossed into their surface. 

At the end of the traverse you “tied it off” to another previously established point on the earth’s surface.

 Sometimes that was all that was done.  

In that case, a line was all that had been created.  

Such a line could be the initial centerline of a highway yet to be built, for example.  

Or it could be used as the reference for more useful information, such as the contour of the land on both of its sides out a quarter mile on each side in fifty-foot increments. 

To do that you needed to establish the elevation of incremental points down the traverse, and their associated incremental offsets on each side every fifty feet. 

If you had seen it drawn on the map, it would have looked like a giant fish skeleton, like in the comics: the balloon over a cat’s head has one when the cat is dreaming of a fish dinner. 

Jerry and Jerry had run the traverse previously.  

It had taken part of the late winter and all of the spring.  

When I joined them, our new job was to shoot the contours. 

We needed to create the fish skeleton and get the elevations from its points. 

That was thought to be a job that would take most of the rest of the infant summer.  

And it did.