All That We Carried Read online

  “Dad says those are fixed and a waste of money.”

  “He said the whole fair is a waste of money.”

  They waited as the current group of riders exited out the little gate and then shuffled forward as the line did. The conductor emptied and filled four seats, sent the wheel around three times, then repeated the process. Finally, it was their turn to board. Olivia handed their tickets to an unsmiling woman who never looked at them and led Melanie to the open seat. A scruffy man smelling of cigarette smoke secured the bar across their laps, and the wheel began to spin, slowly lifting them higher and higher above the crowd.

  “Olivia!” came a shout from below.

  She waved to the figure on the ground.

  “Ooooh,” Melanie teased. “There’s your boyfriend.”

  Olivia punched her in the arm. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “I bet he is. I bet you kissed him.” Melanie puckered her lips and closed her eyes.

  Olivia punched her again.

  “Hey! Knock it off. I’ll tell Mom.”

  “And I’ll tell her how annoying you’re being and she won’t blame me.”

  Melanie crossed her arms but could only maintain the sulk for a few seconds before she pointed and screamed, “There’s Mom! There’s Dad!”

  Olivia joined Melanie in waving maniacally for a moment, and then they were making the next circle. When they next reached the top, the wheel stopped. The sun was setting and the moon was rising, and Olivia could see for miles in each direction. Farm fields and clusters of trees and long, straight roads leading off to the horizon. It felt like . . . possibility.

  “Melanie, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “I want to work at the fair.”

  “You want to be a carny?”

  “Yeah. It would be so fun. I bet they get to ride all the rides for free.”

  Olivia rolled her eyes. “Yeah, they all look like they’re having loads of fun.”

  “What do you want to be?” Melanie asked.

  Olivia looked west toward the brilliant setting sun. “An explorer.”

  eleven

  OLIVIA GAZED OUT into the unending parade of tree trunks, her eyes searching for a spot of blue amid the brown and orange and yellow. She wasn’t really concerned just yet. They couldn’t have gone that far off the trail in their quest for dry ground. But as each slice of forest was ruled out, her mind clicked into problem-solving mode.

  She was prepared for this. She had the map. She had a compass. She had her instincts. She’d simply formulate a plan and everything would be okay.

  “I’m so sorry, Ollie,” Melanie said.

  “It’s fine. Don’t worry. It will all be fine. Just let me think.”

  Olivia examined the map. She looked again at the lay of the land. Had they been going mostly uphill or down?

  “Well, do we know which side of the trail we’re on?” she said. “Did we last go right or left to get around the mud?”

  “Right,” Melanie said. “Wait. No. Maybe left? I don’t know. We’ve been weaving all over the place. I don’t know why they don’t keep up this trail more.”

  “Mel, it’s wilderness. That there’s a trail at all, wet or dry, is pretty much the only thing they could do. They can’t control the weather.”

  Olivia chewed her lip. If they’d gone to the right, getting back on track should be rather simple. If they went south, they’d hit the trail. But if they’d gone to the left, going south would bring them farther away from it. They’d eventually hit the river, but they’d be miles off course. At that point they might be better off crossing the river to get to South Boundary Road so they could hitchhike back to their car. The hike would be over and they would have missed all the best features of the park—most of the waterfalls, Lake Superior, the escarpment, and the Lake of the Clouds.

  “The compass is in the bottom right pocket,” Olivia said, turning. “Can you get it out for me?”

  Melanie dug around a bit, then she started removing things and handing them to Olivia—flashlight, a skein of thin rope, a baggie with matches in it, the ridiculous brook trout knife. “Let me try the left side.”

  But Olivia knew it wasn’t in the left side. The left side was for first aid, not tools. She unbuckled the straps on her pack. “Let me look.”

  For the next few minutes, Olivia carefully removed every single item in her pack, one by one, and then put them back. With every pocket she emptied, she felt just a bit more panic tickle the back of her neck. Where was it? She knew she’d bought it along with all the rest of the gear. She remembered the price, the label. She remembered throwing the packaging into the recycling bin. She remembered puzzling over what seemed like needlessly complicated instructions and bringing it to bed with her to watch YouTube videos of how to properly use it.

  And then she could see it clearly, sitting on her nightstand the night before she left. She’d already packed the car. She told herself she’d remember to grab it in the morning, repeated her mantra for the next day: keys, cell phone, compass, keys, cell phone, compass. Only, while she had remembered the first two items, she had forgotten the third. It was still there, sitting on the nightstand, completely useless.

  “I don’t have it,” Olivia said.

  “Did you put it in my pack?” Melanie said.

  “No. I mean I left it at home. On my nightstand.”

  Melanie began unstrapping her own pack now. “Are you sure? Don’t you think we better just check mine?”

  Olivia agreed, but she knew they would not find it. And they didn’t. They were lost in the woods with no compass. With the sun hidden behind a blanket of soft gray clouds, they couldn’t even tell what direction they were facing. They put everything back into place in their packs and stood up.

  “Now what?” Melanie said.

  Olivia looked at the map again. The squiggly lines marking off the changes in elevation blurred. She pulled herself together and wiped at her eyes. “Okay, here’s the deal. Wherever there’s water, you’re going to be going down to it, right? The river cuts through and wears away the rock below. So we need to go downhill to get to the river. You see all these lines really close together?” Olivia pointed to two unnamed peaks on the map. “If we get to this steep incline, we’re going the wrong way.” She pointed to another set of lines. “And I don’t remember going up any areas like this. Now, being that we’re both right-handed, I think it’s likely we’re on the right side of the trail.”

  “I’m left-handed.”

  “What?”

  “I’m left-handed,” Melanie said again. “How could you not remember that?”

  Olivia frowned. “And you were in the lead.”

  “Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. I had forgotten how this whole mess was my fault.”

  “I didn’t say it to point that out. I just said it because it might mean that you tended to go around things to the left rather than the right. It matters to the solution, Melanie. You need to stop being so sensitive.”

  Melanie threw up her hands. “There’s that word again! Sensitive. I’ve always been too sensitive. Well, sorry, but I don’t think I’m being too anything. We all know this is my fault. We all know you’re going to fix it. And then you’ll have something else to be smug about, some other story to tell about your flaky little sister and how you always have to get her out of scrapes.”

  Olivia stepped back and waited for Melanie to exhaust the geyser of words that had obviously been hovering near the boiling point for a while. It had been so long since they’d spent concentrated time together, she’d forgotten how volatile her sister’s temper could be. Melanie spent so much energy trying to get along with people and agree with them that she never opened the tension valve until she was at the point of exploding.

  “Are you done?” Olivia asked. “Because that sort of thing isn’t going to help this situation at all. We both should have been looking for the next blue blaze. I’m as at fault as you are. And I’m the one who forgot the c
ompass.”

  Melanie pressed her lips together.

  “Okay, then,” Olivia continued. “Let’s start moving with the assumption that we’re on the left side of the trail. We’ll head to our right for a bit. And if we start climbing steeply uphill, we’ll assume we’re going the wrong way and turn around. How does that sound?”

  Melanie nodded and ran a hand over her curls, which were looking limp and greasy. Olivia was sure her hair looked even worse.

  “Let’s take a picture,” Olivia said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s take a picture for your blog or whatever. The time we got lost in the woods.”

  Melanie managed a small smile. “Okay, sure.” They got her phone out of her pack and turned it on. “What face should we make?”

  “I don’t know. The face you were making a minute ago when you were so mad at me would do.”

  Melanie let out a little laugh, but Olivia knew she was embarrassed. Mel snapped a picture, then turned off the phone without looking at it.

  “Now then,” Olivia said, “we better move.”

  Melanie looked at her. “You’re much calmer than I would have thought you’d be in this situation.”

  Olivia shrugged. “What’s done is done.”

  “And can’t be undone,” Melanie finished.

  “Except we’re going to try to undo it now by getting back on the trail.”

  She started picking her way through the trees to the right, not at all confident that this was the correct action in their situation. But what else could she do? They couldn’t just stand there. They had to do something with the knowledge they had, which admittedly wasn’t much.

  It was slow going. Neither Olivia nor Melanie said anything. All of their concentration was on feeling the ground beneath their feet and scanning the trees around them for a shock of blue. If only the sun would come out, that would be something at least, but no matter how Olivia strained her eyes against the flat gray sky between the treetops, she could not discern any difference in the light.

  Every time she felt that the ground was leading them down, it would begin to go up, and every time she felt it going up, it would begin to go down. Looking again at the squiggly elevation lines on the map, she could rationalize this pattern no matter what side of the trail they might be on. She could also see that it would be better for them to be lost on the left side, closer to the road and eventual rescue, than the right side with its mountains and trees that stretched on for miles until they ended abruptly at Lake Superior.

  She looked at her watch. They had been walking for twenty minutes or more. Surely if they were going the right direction they would have hit the trail by now. But without a compass or the sun, they couldn’t even be sure that they were going in one direction rather than in circles.

  Unbidden, thoughts of news stories of lost hikers and lost children crowded in. People who had wandered off a trail and over a cliff, who’d gotten stuck in canyons or attacked by wild animals. She remembered a heartbreaking story about a toddler who’d wandered away from his grandmother’s house only to be found dead weeks later, less than a mile from where searchers had been on the first night of the search. That story had haunted her for months after she’d read it, and now it was back, running rampant through her mind.

  That would be them. They would run out of food. Someone would be injured and leave a delectable little trail of blood behind them. They’d be tracked by Melanie’s cougar. They’d eat poisonous wild mushrooms in a doomed bid to stay alive, or they’d freeze under the first snowfall, which wasn’t that far off.

  “Hey, doesn’t moss grow on the north side of trees?” Melanie said.

  Olivia shook herself back to reality. “What?”

  “Moss grows on the north side of trees, right?”

  “That’s not just an old wives’ tale?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She walked around and looked at several of the larger tree trunks nearby. “Well, these have moss on both sides, but there’s more on one side than the other.”

  Olivia examined the trees. “Yes. Maybe.”

  “We don’t have anything better to go on, do we?”

  Olivia shook her head and looked again at the map, hoping, she supposed, that everything would all suddenly fall into place and make sense. “If that’s true, I think we’ve been going west, more or less. And we haven’t hit the trail. If we were on the left side, we probably should have hit it by now. We could be going along right here where there’s not a lot of elevation change overall.”

  Melanie leaned over the map, and Olivia ran her finger along a short section.

  “If we kept going this way—if this is the way we’re going—we would eventually start going downhill, but we wouldn’t reach a trail for miles, and it would be this Cross Trail here, not the Little Carp River Trail we want.”

  “You think we should turn south?”

  “Or what we think is south, yeah.”

  Melanie nodded. “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “I think it’s our best bet—as long as we’re actually on this side of the trail and actually going this direction.”

  They shared a resigned look and then turned what may or may not have been south.

  “You know,” Melanie said as they picked their way through the trees and underbrush, “this all goes to show that you can plan all you like using the facts you know, but at some point you’re going to run into something you just don’t have the data for, and you’re going to have to go with your gut and trust the Universe to send you in the right direction. Not all of life can be mapped out.”

  Olivia rolled her eyes, knowing Melanie couldn’t see her face. “That from one of your videos?”

  “No, but it will be.”

  “If we ever get back to civilization.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re such a pessimist.”

  “Experience has led me to what I think is a reasonable view of the world,” Olivia said, “and it’s not necessarily negative.”

  “Well, what would you call it?”

  “Indifferent. The world is indifferent. The universe doesn’t want one thing or another. It’s just running along according to the natural laws that were put into motion billions of years ago when the universe started expanding. It doesn’t care whether I have a good life or a bad life, a long life or a short life. I don’t matter to it. You don’t matter to it. And that’s okay.”

  “That doesn’t sound okay to me. That sounds horrible.”

  “Luckily, you are not bound to it. I’m not interested in proselytizing and getting everyone to agree with me. I’m not a militant atheist or anything. It makes no difference whether others agree or not. Believe what you want.”

  “So at this moment, as we wander around, lost in the woods, the only hope you have is in yourself? In your ability to find the trail again?”

  Olivia didn’t answer.

  “That seems like a sad way to go through life, is all I’m saying,” Melanie said. “And a hopeless one.”

  Olivia stabbed a hiking pole into the ground. “Yeah, well, a lot of good hope does you. Hope doesn’t save people. Hope didn’t save—”

  She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. They both knew what she was talking about.

  They were quiet for a while as they struggled on. Olivia scanned the trees for moss now, as well as blue blazes. She checked her watch again. They had eaten at Lily Pond at 11:00. It was now nearing 1:30. The sun would set in six hours, and it would start to get dark earlier than that, especially if this cloud cover didn’t break.

  Just as Olivia was beginning to let her fears get the best of her again, she felt the ground change. The balls of her feet started stinging a little, and her toes pressed up against the insides of her shoes. Her knees felt achy, and the muscles on the front of her thighs were sore. They were finally going downhill. Thirty minutes later, she could hear water. She stopped and motioned to Melanie to listen.

  “The river,�
�� she said.

  Olivia picked up the pace, crashing through bushes and tripping on rocks and roots, ignoring the pain in her hip. A moment later she could see it. She wanted to cry, but she just kept stomping through the ferns and fungus to the water’s edge. Melanie caught up with her a few seconds later. Olivia gripped Melanie’s upper arms and pulled her in for a hug made awkward by the packs.

  “We did it!” Melanie said. “We found the river!”

  Olivia threw her pack to the ground and felt her legs buckling as she came down from her heightened state of anxiety. She sat down hard on the ground and felt the tears of relief that she couldn’t stop anymore slide down her face. Melanie plopped down beside her and put an arm around her shaking shoulders.

  “Are you okay?”

  The voice didn’t belong to Melanie.

  twelve

  MELANIE LOOKED UP to see a man coming up out of the water. He wasn’t particularly tall or particularly fat or particularly handsome or particularly anything at all—except wet. Water dripped from his olive-green waders and a beige canvas bag slung across his body, and trickled down his bare forearms beneath the rolled-up sleeves of an orange-and-green-plaid button-up flannel. His hands were empty.

  Melanie was about to stand up when he knelt down to their level.

  “You’re a bit off the path, aren’t you?” he said.

  He had a kind face that somehow looked both concerned and unsurprised, as though he had expected them to tumble out of the forest miles from any trail but was nonetheless troubled by the state they were in. They must look quite a sight after hours pushing through the undergrowth.

  “We lost the trail for a while, trying to avoid the muddy parts,” Melanie said.

  Olivia seemed at last to be able to pull herself together. “Is this the Little Carp River?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “But if you’re looking for the trail, you’re about a mile away from it at the moment. Maybe more.”

  Melanie pulled out a water bottle for her sister and unscrewed the top, but Olivia was focused on the map she’d retrieved from her back pocket.