Company 84 (Santa Clara Valley, California)

The snapping of poppers marked a simple but joyful celebration. Not the most practical way to spread seeds, but by far the most fun.

“To Finley!” The members of Company 84 cheered their captain. She bowed with comic theatricality, but in truth the completion of her fiftieth wildlife crossing was a big deal.

While Company 84 dismantled camp and packed their mobile bunker, soon to depart to their next project, Finley inspected the bridge. Dense foliage drowned out traffic below, flowering plants attracted pollinators, tall trees and carpet-like shrubbery offered sanctuary or food, and poison oak discouraged human use.

The crossing would restore migration paths, reverse habitat fragmentation, and reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions (an unfortunate byproduct of all those new EVs on the roads). Just like her previous forty-nine.

But the significance of this bridge was more than numerical.

Finley could hear her grandfather’s voice as they counted the dwindling herds, describing sprawling elk migrations of yore. Before a concrete river split the land.

Finley removed the urn from her backpack. The wind did most of the scattering. Maybe her grandfather’s spirit would witness great migrations again.

She rubbed her rounding belly. Maybe her child would see them one day too.

Company 17 (Lethbridge, Alberta)

Liam’s childhood had been spent racing flames. Every year, the fires came. He fled, choking on ash.

The elder passed him the smoldering bundle of grass. He took it in both hands and lowered it to the ground. Liam’s heart pounded like the drums nearby. The fire was moving. He felt the urge to run.

A hand on his shoulder held him. The elder smiled. She took the bundle and passed it to her granddaughter. The child took the fire and set it to the ground, following it as it burned.

Liam watched the child shadow the burning path. Cousins and aunts and uncles lit fires, letting them burn cool and slow. They wore coats and blankets in the spring air, laughed and danced.

Learning cultural burning was one of the Corps’ many efforts to foster indigenous partnerships. Liam joined the NACCE to help others flee the dry-season fires, to help them race the flames. But here, people worked as friends alongside the very thing that haunted his childhood.

The elder took Liam’s trembling hand, and together they walked with the fire.

Company 47 (Pinar del Río, Cuba)

Another kite went missing. The culprit was quickly identified as six-year-old Ernesto Acosta. A repeat offender.

Iriye rubbed her temples. As he had the previous three times, the child scowled through the interrogation. In fact, he wouldn’t even look her in the eye.

All of this for one little boy, when they were trying to prepare for the oncoming hurricane, the sixth already this year. That meant reinforcing the power grid, stabilizing homes, distributing supplies, and loading up evacuees onto NACCE airships. And now their kites kept disappearing. Their very expensive, hurricane-gale-tested kinetic energy kites that powered the mobile command station.

Iriye asked community leaders about the boy after he stormed off. He moved with such anger, such destructive impulse. They asked if she’d never suffered loss in her youth, and she had to admit she’d been fortunate. Most hurricanes turned north before hitting her part of Jamaica. She’d never been through the brunt of it. Never stood in its center.

There was a lot of work that needed to be done before the hurricane arrived. But even as time ran short, Iriye was collecting string and paper.

She found Ernesto in the middle of an intersection, knees to his chest. She pulled two kites from behind her back.

The two sat on the roof of a boarded-up house, tugging on strings fighting the wind. He still didn’t meet her gaze, but he seemed somewhat more at ease. Iriye hoped if she weathered the storm, she might reach his center and find peace in his eyes.

Company 239 (Douglas, Wyoming)

Cody handed out water bottles, blankets, warm food. The blizzard hit hard, and fast. Generators hummed life into the NACCE emergency shelter. Wind rumbled outside. People huddled together. An old man in a broad hat strummed his guitar and sang to the children gathering around him. The prairie was once filled with the songs of jackalopes, he sang. They accompanied the choirs of cowboys around their campfires.

Cody signaled that he was taking his coffee break. He held the steaming drink and peered out into the snowstorm. It was beautiful in its own way. He tried to focus on that feeling.

He’d seen so much grief in his time working with disaster response. It was hard to find joy. It was hard not to get lost in the weight of catastrophe.

Jackalopes only imitate human voices, the old man sang. Nobody hears them anymore because nobody sings.

Cody took a sip of his warm coffee, then quietly slipped outside. He closed his eyes. He felt the stinging cold and sang to the prairie, listening for voices singing back through the blizzard.

Company 112 (Poza Rica, Veracruz)

Juaquin could tell he was losing them. The audience, mostly men, middle aged, grumbled in their seats, whispering to each other in a Spanish infused with words Juaquin didn’t know. It wasn’t the Spanish he grew up with in Texas.

Juaquin finished his presentation and stomped sullenly back to the NACCE mobile bunker. Home sweet home.

Some of the others asked how it was going. Their training groups seemed to be faring much better.

Juaquin fell into his bunk, looked at the pictures taped to his wall. Five years. All the benefits of military service but he never had to touch a gun. Building not destroying.

He rolled over. Training roughnecks to build and maintain the new green infrastructure wasn’t going to be easy. Working oil rigs was all these men had ever known. And he’d caught enough of their grumbling to know they saw him as an outsider, just some transient climate engineer. What could they learn from someone who bounced from assignment to assignment? Someone who was a master of nothing.  

Juaquin looked at the wall, his pictures of those assignments. Building mangrove habitats. Evacuating flood zones. Rewilding prairie. Installing wind turbines. He sat up.

Weeks later, as Company 112 was preparing to deploy to its next assignment assisting a crew that built wildlife crossings, somewhat short staffed as their captain was on maternity leave, corps members congratulated Juaquin on the success of his training group. They asked his secret, how he got through to his trainees. Juaquin smiled. The language of the future was adaptability, and none were more fluent than those who moved from place to place, project to project, skill to skill. Not a master of one trade, was he, but a Juaquin of all.