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nonexistent point
Monday, June 30 2008
After a few more false starts, I finally zeroed in on the best-possible estimate for the location of the mystery border post that I began searching for the other day, the one claimed to exist in a recent survey map. That location was 41.928563N, 74.10549W (here's the MSN bird's eye view, which provides a stalkerly dragable view of the neighborhood). I found that spot using my GPS gizmo, and then cast about with the metal detector in all directions on a maximum radius of about 60 feet, but I never found any metal post. As the surveyor had flagged every metal post he'd found and there had never been any flags in this area, my theory now is that he completely invented the existence of this post. But why? To justify other inaccuracies in his survey? I heard one story that the surveyor had originally assumed that one of the larger of my stone cairns was a survey point, and this had thrown wild inaccuracies into his initial survey, casting a border line through our uphill neighbors' swimming pool and outbuildings.
My GPS gizmo is a Magellan Explorist 210, and comes with features such as route logging and point of interest storage. But the route logging is pretty much useless, as there is no obvious way to clear past routes, so anything I do in this area takes place in a hopeless tangle of lines. As for point of interest storage, I've lost more points of interest than I've managed to save. The gizmo acts as though it's saving them, but then only a few of them are there when I go back later to look through its file system. The only thing the Explorist 210 can do reliably is tell me my longitude and latitude, and if it's of a significant point I find it safest to just take a photograph of its screen.
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