It was not glamorous work. Mosquitoes found every gap in her clothing, her boots developed an odor that seemed permanent, and once she slipped in mud deep enough to make her laugh and swear at the same time. The notebook pages became curled at the edges from humidity. Warren watched her return at noon with a sunburned neck and a bag full of muddy stakes and wondered how somebody raised in the same family could find satisfaction in work that produced no immediate saleable crop.
Her former supervisor called with an offer to join a field survey team several states away. It was a decent contract, paid better than the temporary jobs she had taken before, and promised months of work that could lead to permanent employment. Casey said she would think about it. After hanging up, she sat on the bed in the room where she had slept as a girl and stared at the open suitcase she had never bothered to unpack completely.
She wanted to stay because the farm needed help. She also wanted the freedom to leave because she did not believe her life should be determined by a debt incurred before she was born. The two wishes made her feel disloyal in opposite directions. When Warren knocked and asked whether she was coming to supper, she closed the suitcase and followed him downstairs without explaining anything.
The first severe dry spell of the summer arrived in July. The air turned hard and still, the higher cornfields curled under midday heat, and the creek shrank between its banks. Shallow water along the western margin of the low ground withdrew, exposing dead soybean stems and dark mud that cracked when the sun held it for days. Warren saw the retreat and felt a bitter sort of vindication.
"There goes your wetland," he said one evening as Casey studied a series of new photographs. "Give it another week, and it'll be dust with a few weeds standing in it."
Casey did not answer immediately. She had noticed the same drying, and part of her was afraid he was right. If most of the water vanished in a dry summer, the ecological indicators might prove too temporary for meaningful restoration, or the proposed project might need engineering changes that were impossible to justify. She did not want to build hope on a summer puddle any more than Warren did.
The next morning, she walked toward the deepest section, using a firm route she had marked weeks earlier. The outer edges were indeed drying, and one isolated shallow pool had disappeared completely, leaving a crust of sediment where small fish had once moved. But the deepest central basin still held water beneath a growing patch of aquatic plants. The level had dropped far less than she expected, and when she compared her readings she realized the change was smaller than the measurement uncertainty she had allowed for some previous weeks.
She checked the staff again, photographed it from two angles, and returned the following morning. The result was similar. The deep water was not behaving like a shallow depression filled only by the last storm. It suggested a more persistent hydrologic connection, perhaps to shallow groundwater or seepage trapped in the old basin, but she did not possess the information needed to choose among those explanations.