For several nights, she barely slept.
She inspected water levels before dawn.
Checked the old gate.
And contacted the retired hydrologist with every new reading.
The northern reservoir remained high.
The downstream flow still behaved strangely.
And the county had not yet provided the complete engineering assessment she'd requested.
Finally, an inspector visited the accessible portion of the watershed.
He reviewed several visible structures and said no immediate failure was apparent from where he stood.
The young farmer asked whether he'd examined the new berm behind the trees.
He said access hadn't been available during the visit.
She stared.
"That's the part I'm worried about."
The inspector looked toward the forest.
Then acknowledged that further assessment was necessary.
She thanked him.
But the uncertainty remained.
And as harvest approached, she found herself preparing for two completely different possibilities.
A successful cranberry season.
Or a flood that could take the farm away before the fruit reached the processing plant.
The night before the flood, the young farmer found her father's last unfinished letter.
She wasn't looking for it.
She was searching through the old office cabinet for an equipment invoice when a thin brown envelope slipped from between two folders and fell onto the floor. Her father's handwriting appeared across the front, faded but unmistakable.
For the next person responsible for the water.
She sat down slowly.
For several seconds, she held the envelope without opening it.
Her father had always been better at practical advice than emotional speeches.
When she was frightened about leaving for college, he'd taught her how to check the oil in her car.
When she returned home exhausted after a difficult semester, he'd taken her into the fields and pointed out the first blossoms of spring.
And when he became ill, he expressed his fear by asking whether the pumps had been serviced.
She opened the envelope.
Inside were two pages.
The first contained notes about the farm's old emergency drainage system.
The second was a letter.
Her father wrote that he'd begun worrying about the northern reservoir after hearing discussions about expanding farmland near the old relief corridor. He feared that people who no longer remembered the valley's flood history might treat the corridor as wasted space.