Free The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown

computer screen shielded from the sun (or more likely, here, the rain) by a blue canopy. Dean Goodman, a California-based computer scientist who had written GPR-Slice, the best software to interpret ground-penetrating radar data, had come to Iceland to show off its capabilities. His was the movie of Emperor Trajan’s eel pond. He had mapped tombs and castles in Japan, and Native American ruins from Louisiana to Martha’s Vineyard. He looked jaunty in a Greek fisherman’s cap, pushing the gizmo up and down the hayfield as if he were mowing the lawn. Problem was, haymaking hadn’t started yet in northern Iceland. The GPR jogger could hardly roll through the knee-high grass. John duct-taped a two-by-four to the front, and yoked himself up like an ox to assist. The grass was wet, and in short order he and Dean looked as though they had waded a stream.
    Worse, the data was lousy. The wheels made too much noise, each bump across the lumpy ground registering as an electronic burp. So they shucked the wheels, set the orange box into a white plastic tub, duct-taped on the two-by-four, and let John play ox while Brian Damiata walked behind, working the data recorder. Until the data recorder was in his hands Brian—who is as quietly critical as John is exuberant—had been invisible. Suddenly he was in control. Although Dean objected that doing things Brian’s way would mean tons more work for only a tiny improvement in data quality, Brian could not be dissuaded. He was here to get good data, and he would get it if he had to walk this field day and night. And since darkness never really falls in high summer in Iceland, he could—and did.
    Over the next two weeks, Brian and John made several discoveries—each at the cost of a five- to ten-mile hike back and forth across a hayfield. For instance, water off the tall grass, pooling in the white tub, caused the microwaves to “float,” scattering sideways instead of penetrating the ground. John discarded the tub and gave the orange box a more aerodynamic profile by duct-taping on two rounded “fenders” he had carved from a green plastic watering can with his utility knife. Even without the wheels, the box bumped and bounced too much. John duct-taped a soccer-ball-sized rock to its top to add weight. The antenna wasn’t shielded. If Brian’s knee hit the cable that tethered him to the orange box, as he walked behind John carrying the data recorder, the microwave receiver saw it as data. When the battery was changed the data recorder was prone to reprogramming itself to its standard settings—which were completely wrong for Iceland’s wet soils. To enter the data manually, Brian had to click “Enter” at every meter mark. But the buttons on the recorder were close together, and instead of “Enter,” his finger might hit “Stop.” Then they had to start the line over.
    And how do you walk in a straight line for a hundred meters, the length of a football field? First we marked opposite sides of the field with colored plastic survey flags spaced a meter apart. Then we advanced a hundred-meter measuring tape from flag to flag, meter by meter across the field, as a guideline. On calm days, after the hay was cut, two of us—one on each end of the tape—could handle it and have ample time to count the horses grazing along the river or the round bales accumulating in the neighbors’ hayfields, to admire the dramatic sky over the glacier-carved mountains, or to watch a pair of swans drive two interlopers away from their nest by the brook. On the day the wind hit gale force, it took six of us, staggered along the guideline, to pull the tape out taut and keep it more-or-less straight, holding it down with our toes.
    By the end of the first week, John decided the crew needed an excursion. After supper we would go to Grettir’s Bath, a hot spring beside the ocean a half-hour’s drive north, walled up for bathing since saga times. The name honored Grettir the Strong, a saga