The wipers on her truck were high-speed manic over Tyler's soft murmuring from the crew cab booster seat. Leah was always relieved when he was in a happy mood. He'd been a difficult birth, a colicky baby, a toddler prone to run and hide in stores if she looked away for even one second, the kind of loud, at three, that made elderly women raise their eyebrows, purse their lips, the kind of loud that the teachers at his new day care frequently mentioned at evening pickup. Tyler jumped down from the truck and zigzagged from puddle to puddle, stomping his mud-booted feet, his broad smile all delighted sunshine. Everything Tyler felt—delight, frustration, joy, anger—he felt all the way and out loud.

“Mommy! Fish!” Tyler pointed and shrieked. Leah looked up to see an osprey struggling with a fresh kill, gaining altitude until it finally made the nest. It had been Leah's idea to place a plywood board in the high branches of a dead cottonwood to lure ospreys to Riverside. In late spring, she had caught the white breast of a male making graceful, laconic swoops with a river fish in his talons, descending toward a haphazard nest built of sticks and twigs on her platform, his teakettle chirping attracting Leah's gaze easily as it attracted the female who eventually chose him. Now, she and Tyler monitored the young in the nest.

Leah had a degree in natural resource management, spent her days considering ways to improve the collective quality of life—juggling the competing demands of resource extraction and recreation, considering fair allocation, providing access to nature so more people would come to love it as she did, work harder to protect it, take loud, passionate action to save the whole dying world. She'd grown up fishing these ponds as a girl, back when it was still an abandoned quarry. She'd learned to chase shots and kiss boys under the old cottonwoods in high school. She'd mummied herself into her sleeping bag and slept outside on the pond banks, dreaming of a future as bright, as dramatic, as the night sky constellations. She wanted to give her boy all the best she herself had gotten from this place, wanted him to know he had roots in this ground, wanted him to feel the way those roots could nourish and support him. In truth, Leah needed her own constant reminders of what these roots were worth. Roots were also binding, stuck deep, they kept her static through the aftermath of catastrophes past, an easy target for future catastrophes.

“I'm hungry, Mommy.” Tyler had lost interest in the osprey, was pulling tufts of buffalo grass out in clumps.

“Want me to get you a fish?” she said, leaning her own smile close to his, flexing her fingers like talons.