Chapter 88
MARY LOU GOT WHAT SHE wanted. I saw much less of Teo after the tender returned, and even less of him once the summer ended. He was in Sassari, and the only updates I received came from Francesca, who seemed to sense that I enjoyed learning about her nephew’s comings and goings.
What Mary Lou couldn’t have counted on when she warned me to stay away from Teo was that I’d begin spending more time with Bruno and Luca, who would have returned home long ago except that Bruno had somehow cobbled together the funding to conduct a preliminary environmental survey of the archipelago.
The survey, Bruno explained, would look at the islands’ meteorological and ecological characteristics in the hope of getting a better handle on where to conduct ongoing sampling and radiometric analysis.
Meteorological characteristics referred to the stuff that was always changing—temperature, wind, rainfall, even water currents—but ecological characteristics were more stable.
The fact that the entire archipelago was one big sheet of granite, for instance, or that the highest point on the island of La Maddalena was only eighty-nine feet above sea level.
Temperature was simple to track, as was rainfall.
Measuring wind speed and direction was also relatively easy, provided the anemometer Bruno had ordered ever arrived.
What the team spent the bulk of their time—and money—on that autumn was studying the archipelago’s currents.
This was important work because radioactive particles traveled on currents.
If the team knew where and how the water moved around the archipelago, they could determine the best places to take samples that would yield accurate results.
Bruno put Salvario on a semipermanent retainer and acquired a couple dozen current meters, which were plastic propeller-like devices attached to a cable.
At one end of the cable was an anchor, and at the other end was a buoy.
The water moved through the propellers, causing them to spin, and with each revolution, a magnetic switch sent a pulse to a recording device that floated near the surface.
We placed these current meters all over the archipelago, including Santo Stefano Bay.
But once they were in the water, maintaining them was a never-ending job.
The data had to be downloaded, and the propellers got so scummy that they constantly needed to be taken apart and cleaned.
I liked that job, so sometimes I’d go out on Salvario’s boat with Bruno and Luca and scrub the plastic until my knuckles were raw.
My Italian was getting better, which allowed me to have small conversations with Luca and Salvario while I worked.
They liked to play this game with me where they’d ask me a series of very simple questions to test my language skills.
I got a point for answering each question correctly.
I argued that I should also get a half point if I managed to understand the question but lacked the vocabulary to properly respond. Luca laughed. “Lascia o raddoppia!”
“I have a question,” I said to Bruno in English one morning as I laid a sparkling propeller at his feet.
He was messing with a recording device, but I knew he was listening.
“Why not just ask Salvario and his friends to tell you how the currents work? Anyone who’s fished these waters for half a century has to know them like the back of his hand. ”
Bruno squinted up at me, then repeated what I’d said to Salvario, who slapped his knee and said, “è da un pezzo che lo dico?”
“What did he just say?” I asked, though I was fairly certain I knew.
“He said this is what he has been saying all along.”
While we worked, Bruno told me more about marine radioecology, a relatively new field back then.
In the fifties, scientists had become concerned with the presence of “artificial” radioactivity in the world’s oceans, and they’d been trying to get a handle on the situation ever since.
Bruno explained that there were all sorts of ways radioactive substances could enter the water: fallout from nuclear testing, the everyday operation of nuclear-powered ships and submarines, accidents aboard nuclear-powered ships and submarines, and the discharge of industrial radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, which were always situated on the coast or alongside major tributaries.
Early studies indicated that the three hundred or so submarines in operation around the world were discharging five thousand cur of radioactive waste into the oceans each year.
This wasn’t terrible, but the issue was that some of these chemical components had long half-lives.
A half-life, Bruno told me, was the amount of time it took for a nuclide population to decay by half of its original value, and there were apparently some nuclear by-products with half-lives so long, we wouldn’t be rid of them in our lifetime.
“You can imagine,” said Bruno, “that if these components are allowed to accumulate, we’ll reach a point where it will be too late to do anything about it. ”