On Saturday my coworker left a message on my machine. She said we'd been cleared for field work on Monday, so please show up at the office at 6:30 am and to call her if I had a problem with the time. Maggie and I are friends. She knows all too well that I have a problem with anything before 8:00 am, as a general principle. It's not her favorite time of day either. I grimaced and set my alarm for 5:40 am. Ug.
I spent all night waking up every hour in a panic, afraid I had overslept and was late for something I couldn't remember. Because I had watched a sci-fi flick just before bed, the first theory that rose to my mind at each of this sleepless intervals had something to do with hunting androids.
I hate it when that happens.
I shuffled into the office with my work boot laces trailing behind me and my eyes half-shut. (I suppose it's half-open if you're an optimist. At 6:30 am, I'm not an optimist.) Maggie and I met in an empty corridor and vowed that there would be a coffee stop before we got a mile away from the office.
I printed out field maps while Maggie loaded the gear. We hitched the trailer up to the truck, appropriated caffeine, and began our voyage. In the truck, I went over the maps.
I'm a geographer by trade, but it's a small company and I've got a few other hats wobbling precariously on top of that one. Today I'm a geophysical technician. We're heading out to a small cemetery that was relocated about 50 years ago.
Relocated? you ask. Yep. Relocated. I'm sure you're thinking that stuff like this only happens in movies like Poltergeist, and usually with fairly disastrous consequences. That's what I was thinking as we got out of the truck and looked around anyway. But believe it or not, cemetery relocation is not all together uncommon.
In this case, someone decided that it was in an inconvenient location and as the residents themselves weren't in a position to defend their neighborhood, it was moved, headstones, coffins, and all. The trouble is, they're not actually positive that all of the current inhabitants have proper name tags, so that's where we come in. We run some equipment back and forth over the ground looking for any changes in soil conductivity that might indicate a straggler.
It seemed rather disrespectful, driving the gear right over the dearly departed, but the folks in charge reminded us that they mow right over them all the time, so not to worry about it. Still, both Maggie and I are more superstitious than we probably ought to be and I can tell you that we made sure not to run over anybody's little flowers or pinwheels. I had no wish to go pissing off any dead people.
The survey went smoothly. We set up the GPS unit, ran our swaths across the graves, broke for lunch, came back, and finished up. No disturbances. The only corpse I saw was a large dead turkey laying near a headstone. I kid you not. A whole feathered turkey. Even weirder than seeing a dead turkey in a cemetery was the deja-vu feeling that I had somehow seen a dead turkey in a cemetery before. Don't question strangely familiar feelings in a cemetery. Do your work and get out.
The lunch experience was a little odd. This area we were working in is a summer tourist spot, but it's March and there isn't a whole lot of business up around in there, so anyplace that was open was. . . eccentric. We stopped at a little market that claimed to have a deli. What they had was a empty, unplugged deli counter, bait boxes with no bait, 6 or 7 aisles of shelves with literally nothing on them, and a cooler stocked with sodas and bad beer.
We ended up at what appeared to be another little market, but was actually a smoke-filled bar with three old guys drinking hard liquor before noon on a Monday. They also had a few spinning racks of useful things like beach balls and post cards. We asked what they had in the way of food. It broke down to aged-looked sandwiches saran-wrapped and stored in a cooler, hot dogs (unseen), and homemade egg rolls that the proprietors were making right there on the counter. The place was not altogether clean. In fact, one glance at the facilities and I decided that the port-a-potty on the project site was cleaner. But we figured that the egg rolls were deep fried so they were probably pretty safe.
We finished up the survey pretty quickly after that and headed back to the office. It had been a 9 hour day by the time we got back but there was work waiting for me when I walked in the door that had to be handled right this instant or the world was going to drop out of orbit and plummet through the galaxy before careening into a fiery planetoid. My office can be a little dramatic at times.
Between the sun and dust all day, I felt like I had been battered and fried. Working at a desk in dirty socks just sucks. I did what I needed to do, momentarily considered hang around to write a blog to you people and then changed my mind. (Sorry.) I went home, showered, and ate something a little more nutritious and satisfying that egg rolls.
I still can't figure out why a dead turkey in a cemetery should feel familiar to me, but such is life.