All That We Carried by Erin Bartels

Author:Erin Bartels [Bartels, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493428533
Google: 8NUNEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Baker Books
Published: 2021-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

eighteen

MELANIE COULD FEEL the power of the lake even in the woods. The wind was high and cold, and the rhythmic waves crashing against the shoreline quickened her pulse and her pace. When they came out of the trees, she caught her breath. Superior was a deep gray-blue, flecked with the white of breaking waves all the way out to the horizon, where it merged seamlessly with the cloudy sky. The smooth tumbled stones that made up the beach were a darker gray, slick and wet and adorned with the occasional orange leaf that had lodged there. Large bodies of boulders hunched in the surf, and the skeletons of dead trees and driftwood lay like petrified lightning.

This was what she hadn’t realized she’d been longing to see. The waterfalls were pretty and the fall colors were dazzling, but Lake Superior was something altogether different. It was power. Raw power, gathered up and gathered up and then released in a relentless onslaught as it battered the shore. People thought of fire as the most powerful of the four elements, but to Melanie it had always been water. She could see it at home in Petoskey on the shores of Lake Michigan, but Superior was in a category of its own. It was constantly cold, even at the height of summer. It was treacherous, as the many shipwrecks littering its bed attested. It seemed almost to be calculating, as though it worked a will known only to itself. On a still summer morning it might be glassy and serene, but now as the cold season began it felt delightfully malicious.

To her life coaching clients, Melanie was always advocating things that would bring them peace and serenity—fountains, gardens, meditation, therapeutic massages, walks in the forest—because of course that’s what they needed. In an anxious world, her clients were the stressed-out, the burned-out, and the down-and-out. They came to her looking for balance and a sense that everything was going to be okay.

But Melanie had begun to think that she had perhaps just a bit too much serenity in her life. Her predictable, comfortable life. Her days that started with green tea and ended with chamomile-peppermint. Her wardrobe of earth tones. Her house with its tastefully minimalist, Zen-like atmosphere. Her collection of yoga-friendly music that had no hooks, no rise or fall, just a constant, insistent middleness. So on the few occasions she was met with something like Lake Superior in October, she savored it with an almost guilty sense of pleasure, like she was flirting with a dangerous man.

For a moment as she stared at the writhing lake, Melanie forgot about everything else. She forgot about Olivia and the map and her plans for her sister’s spiritual awakening. She forgot how cold she was, how sore her muscles were, how dirty her hair felt. She forgot about the decision they would have to come to in twenty minutes. She stood facing the wind and the water and felt supremely thankful. Though to whom, she was not quite sure.

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