The glass is cool thickness on the pads of my fingertips. The pane is solid, sturdy and slightly vibrating. The mechanics of turning a river into a highway are humming through the clear divide.

I’m looking through a window at step 18 of 21 in the fish ladder along Ballard Locks in Seattle, Washington. The locks, there are two at Ballard, move boats into and out of Puget Sound. They raise water up and drain it down by as much as 26 feet multiple times a day. They separate freshwater and saltwater, trapping sea life in transition between the two liquids.

On a map, it doesn’t look all that far. A quick jaunt up the freeway. A race across a sea of potato fields and a good section of the Idaho National Laboratory, where plans are in place to build a dozen modular nuclear reactors to help power some 36 western communities starting in less than a decade. Finally, there’s the run up the river valley to where the desert meets the Lemhi Range.