The boy escaped.
Warren looked offended for several minutes.
Yet he understood the deeper truth behind the question. Memory was already rearranging the farm. To a new generation, the wetland looked inevitable. It was not. It existed because of a chain of choices, mistakes, measurements, legal decisions, ecological processes, and one stubborn refusal to let someone else define what the land meant.
Casey made sure the records remained intact.
She preserved Renata's reports, Harlon's settlement files where legally appropriate, old drainage maps, agency approvals, monitoring summaries, historical photographs, and her original field notebooks. She labeled the first notebook carefully because its pages had begun to soften at the edges.
May 7. 5:42 a.m. Water entering from northwest ditch. Fence post three submerged 22 inches. Creek within banks.
The handwriting was quick and uneven.
Warren read the page years later.
"You wrote all that before breakfast?"
"You were yelling at the county on the phone. Somebody had to be useful."
"I was useful."
"You were loud."
"Same thing sometimes."
She shook her head.
Casey's professional work expanded beyond the Puit farm. She partnered with consultants who needed field documentation and landowner coordination, then eventually created a small practice focused on helping farm families understand conservation opportunities without overselling them. Her first rule was that she did not sell mitigation credits, appraise land, or provide legal advice.
Her second rule was more important.
She never began a conversation by telling a landowner what their property should become.
She asked what the land had been, how it behaved, what the family needed, what constraints existed, and what records could support decisions. Sometimes she referred people to drainage engineers because their problem was simply broken infrastructure. Sometimes she connected them with conservation programs. Sometimes she told them the idea they had heard about was unlikely to work.
Those were the clients who trusted her most later.
"You're bad at sales," Warren told her.
"Good."
"You tell people no too often."
"Also good."
"You're definitely related to me."
By the time Warren was eighty-two, the old measuring stake at the wetland's center had become unnecessary for official monitoring, but Casey kept it in the equipment shed. The bottom was stained dark from years of saturation. Faded marks showed early water depths.
One afternoon she found Warren holding it.