Editor’s Note: Anna King knew John Zachara, he was a friend and colleague of her husband at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. John Zachara was a brilliant geoscientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. And he had a dry sense of humor. In the mountains of British Columbia a decade ago, Zachara was really getting bugged by horse-flies. “The horse flies were actually just horrible, they were just biting us,” best friend and science colleague Jim Fredrickson remembers. “You know horse flies, they are slow and kind of clumsy, but there are so many of them, eventually one of them gets you.” So Zachara tied one fly with dental floss to the top button of his baseball cap, Fredrickson said. “And so the fly was still flying around alive as everything,” Fredrickson said. “And he had that fly as a pet on the top of his hat. And it was the strangest sight.” Zachara, 69, who studied Hanford, the nuclear cleanup site in southeast Washington, worked much of his life trying to