By six o’clock in the morning, the Ferry Turning Basin looked like a battlefield between the ancient earth and the rising mountain.
The crescent-shaped basin, dry and choked with brambles for thirty years, had been transformed into a huge high-pressure holding bowl, four hundred yards long and two hundred yards wide. It was surrounded by an earthen levee heavy with eight-inch ash timbers and sixty wicker hampers of river gravel. At the northern end. There, the basin met the main canal, the breach they had cut through the three-foot stone retaining wall was roaring with live water. A broad, churning clouded eye that tumbled four feet over a timber spillway doorstep. It filled the red clay basin at the rate of four thousand gallons a minute.
Sixty men and women in oilskin coats, leather aprons, and wool caps stood along the muddy narrow high walkways, their breath misting in the freezing drizzle, their boots buried ankle-deep in the clay.
Pella Rook stood on the central timber platform above the southern discharge water chute, her canvas tool apron strapped tight over her bottle-green tunic. Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs were in her hand. Their jaws measured the clearance between the four-bolt iron pipe rim and the heavy cuff of Jo Saye’s offering reed-canvas sleeve.
