Watershed - Prologue
The land remembers what we forget.
I've been a writer since I was a kid—from crafting my family's holiday letter to winning my 15 minutes of middle school English fame with a story that featured every classmate (and somehow didn't get me in trouble). I even won $500 in a Detroit Free Press contest for a story about a snowball fight. But somewhere along the way, life steered me toward technical writing, corporate proposals, and eventually essays and nonfiction.
I've always missed stories, though. And I've always struggled with promoting my work—that familiar "not good enough" shadow that haunts so many of us. But Substack has changed something for me. This community, this platform where I've somehow climbed to #92 on the Culture writers list (how did that happen?!)—it's given me a way to share work that feels authentic rather than promotional.
So here we are. Serializing feels like the perfect accountability tool for someone my friend
calls an "Idea Terrorist"—someone who starts projects and... well, you know how that usually goes. But this time feels different. This time, I get to share the journey as it unfolds, get feedback along the way, and build something together.This prologue introduces Josie Copeland—a veteran intelligence officer coming home to heal, only to discover the land itself needs saving. What starts as personal reckoning becomes something much larger.
Maybe that's what we all need, especially right now. Stories that remind us we're not alone, that we're not powerless, that healing—for people and places—is always possible when we're willing to fight for it.
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The story starts here.
Prologue
(Updated June 26, 2025)
Hypothermia kills the decision-making first.
The Baltic Sea, black as crude oil. Ice cracking like gunshots. Then falling—
Water in her lungs, her boots, her thoughts. Cold that bit through bone, through training, through the part of her brain that knew which way was up. Her gear dragged her down while her vest fought to bring her up, two forces tearing at her ribs until breathing became a luxury she couldn't afford.
Muffled voices above the surface. Unreachable. Distant as stars.
The cold ate her fingers first, then her ability to count them. Eight soldiers. Twelve. Three. Numbers sliding away like everything else, leaving only the primitive mathematics of drowning: lungs burning, heart hammering, the terrible weight of water pressing in from all sides.
Morrison's face, blue-white and sinking. Chen's hand reaching, always reaching, never quite close enough. The sound of bubbles escaping—from her mouth, from theirs, impossible to tell whose breath was whose in the churning darkness.
She kicked toward light that might have been surface, might have been memory. Her vision tunneled. Her thoughts scattered like schools of fish, silver and quick and gone.
The water tasted like metal. Like the last thing she would ever know.
Then hands grabbing her vest, hauling her up through liquid silence into air that hurt her throat, into voices that sounded wrong, into a world where Morrison and Chen were not breathing and she was and there was no reason for it, no logic, no justice.
Just cold water and bad decisions and the way hypothermia kills everything except the one thing you wish it would take.
The memory.
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