The marsh, the surveyors agreed, was a nuisance: it bred mosquitoes, swallowed survey stakes, and resisted every attempt to assign it a clean acreage. So when the drainage company arrived with its pumps and its promise of reclaimed farmland, the town council approved the plan in a single evening. Only old Mrs. Calloway, who had fished those waters for sixty years, rose to speak. She did not argue about acreage or mosquitoes. “You will dry it,” she said quietly, “and then you will spend the next hundred years wondering where the herons went, and the floods came from, and why the wells taste of nothing.” The council thanked her and adjourned.