When I am asked by others “What do you do for a living?”
“How do you earn your pay?”
I smile and say “I’m a Land Surveyor,
and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

For you see while others work in offices
trying to beat the bottom line,
I stand out with Mother Nature
with the breezes and warm sunshine.

And when I go home in the evening,
my little son crawls up on my knee
“What was work like today Daddy?”
Tell me, “What did you see?”

I say “I saw the dew dry with the morning dawn,
and a mother doe standing quietly with her yearling fawn,
I saw a Red-Tailed Hawk fly high against the clear blue sky,
ever watching for a field mouse with his hungry eye.”

Then my little son’s eyes light up,
they shine a bright, clear blue.
He hugs my neck and whispers
“I want to be just like you.”

I hug him back and don’t try to hide my Father’s pride,
I say “I would be proud little man for you to work by my side.”
But when you take the Surveyor’s road, the one traveled by Lewis and Clark,
you set out on a path of adventure and hard work; it’s not all a walk in the park.

Yes, you feel the warm breezes of spring, and the chill of the early fall,
the cold, raw mornings of winter when the temperature doesn’t rise at all,
and the hot humid days of summer, when it’s 100 degrees in the shade,
when you’ll think, if only I wasn’t a Surveyor, I think I would have it made.

You’ll wade through the ditches and water, fall on your face in the mud,
fight the briars and things that sting, searching for your Hub.
Sometimes you’ll deal with nature, her storms and other acts of God,
while all the time you keep searching for your corner, that 5/8” iron rod.

But then one day you’ll crest a rise and see a panoramic view
of cloudless skies where eagles fly and a mountain lake of crystal blue.
Yet when you pause and wonder about this gift that God has given you,
remember you’re a Surveyor, and there’s nothing you would rather do.

We gather every workday with all our tools of the trade,
our tapes, our rods, our flagging, and our freshly sharpened blade.
We have done this through the ages, mapped the World, distance and line.
We were there to build the Pyramids, in the Pharaoh’s time.

We map it all on any scale, no matter how small or grand,
from Columbus’ New World to the smallest parcel of land,
and when someday we go to the stars to expand the human race,
a Surveyor will be there waiting, ready to mark the place.

And when at last my job is done, and I’m laid to my eternal rest,
I hope they place a marker with my “final point”, there on my chest.
I hope that I’m not forgotten, that I’m thought of from time to time,
I’ll always be there with you brothers, somewhere “cutting line”.