Category: Reckoning 7

First Jeff Martin bought the narrow strip of land between the river and Banks Road from the town, then he spider-webbed caution tape between the trees and nailed posted signs to their bark. The swimming hole where so many of us had spent our childhood summers was no longer ours. And this with each year hotter than the last.

Martin, who also owned The Weekly Gazette, . . .

The Submersible aQuatic Cetacean Communication Robot—professionally known as SQCCR, affectionately known as “Squawker”—splashes into the harbor from the starboard side of the Charlotte’s Web at dawn. A few brilliant, cool drops hit Julia’s skin.

The heat index is already 96 and aiming for the red by ten. What must the dolphins think of the extra three degrees . . .

Nothing at the bottom of the ocean bothers her. Nothing natural, that is. On a repair job in the Bering Sea last month, she encountered a lost Japanese spider crab hiking back to the Pacific, following a straight line of radiant heat from the subsea fiber-optic cable she had been dispatched to splice together at a break point. As she stripped the cut cables, the . . .