Every family has one story that gets told over and over again.
For years, ours was about the night Lee and I came home to find two teenage boys sitting in a fourteen-foot john boat... floating in the middle of our twenty-foot above-ground swimming pool.
They had fishing poles in their hands and were "fishing."
I don't remember whether I laughed first or fussed first.
Looking back now, I probably did both.
At the time I thought that would always be the john boat story.
I was wrong.
---
A few years later, Austin and Wyatt found what they considered the perfect secret fishing spot.
There was only one problem.
You couldn't drive to it.
The only way to get there was to carry a fourteen-foot john boat down the road, through the woods, and all the way to the water.
So that's exactly what they did.
They wrestled that boat over their heads, sweating and complaining the whole way, finally dropped it in the water...
...and realized neither one of them had remembered the paddles.
I'm sure there was plenty of finger-pointing over whose fault that was.
Walking all the way back wasn't an option.
Nothing was going to stop them from fishing.
So they improvised.
Sticks.
Tree limbs.
A random piece of a two-by-four they found lying nearby.
Whatever floated and could push water was suddenly considered a paddle.
To them, it worked just fine.
---
After carrying that boat back and forth several times, they decided they had a better idea.
Why not just leave it hidden near the lake?
It was perfect...
...until several days of heavy rain raised the water level.
Guess what had been left sitting near the shoreline?
The john boat.
It simply disappeared.
For weeks they searched.
Then one afternoon, while they were fishing from the bank, a man across the lake yelled,
"Hey! Did y'all lose a boat?"
He had found it floating.
Not only did he return it...
He handed them two brand-new paddles and a couple of nice life jackets.
He told them he'd enjoyed watching them out there fishing.
Sometimes people really are good.
---
So naturally...
They learned absolutely nothing.
They carried the boat back to the secret spot and decided this time they'd tie it to a tree.
Problem solved.
Or so they thought.
A few days later they walked down to fish...
...and the john boat was gone.
Again.
Weeks passed before they spotted it.
Another teenage boy was happily fishing out of it.
Austin yelled across the water,
"Hey! That's our boat!"
After a conversation that only teenage boys could somehow make work, the other boy agreed to give it back.
There was just one catch.
Since he'd found the boat, he'd painted it, carpeted it, and installed a really nice trolling motor.
He only wanted to keep the motor.
Fair enough.
They all agreed Wyatt would ride with him back to his house so he could remove it.
Austin would stay behind and wait.
Nobody thought to ask one very important question.
"Where exactly do you live?"
So off they went.
Out of the cove.
Past the bridge they weren't supposed to cross.
Across the main channel of the lake.
Eventually they reached the boy's house.
True to his word, he removed the trolling motor and gave Wyatt the boat back.
Then Wyatt looked around.
He was alone.
In a fourteen-foot john boat.
With one paddle.
And a very, very long trip back.
Austin later said it took Wyatt nearly an hour and a half to make it back.
By the time he finally returned, he was too exhausted to argue.
Unfortunately...
They still had to carry the boat back through the woods.
---
The boys never stopped trying to make carrying that boat easier.
Austin even came up with a system where he'd drive the boat as close as possible, unload it, drive back home, and then walk so they wouldn't have to carry it quite as far.
If there was a harder way to do something, they usually found it.
Eventually they started leaving the john boat hidden by the water again.
A couple of weeks later...
It disappeared.
Again.
Only this time...
It never came back.
---
That old john boat probably wasn't worth much money.
But somehow it became part of our family's story.
It survived a swimming pool.
Countless fishing trips.
Floods.
Teenage ingenuity.
Two different owners.
One very tired Wyatt rowing halfway across a lake.
And more miles being carried through the woods than any john boat should ever have to travel.
Sometimes I wonder if it's still sitting somewhere along that lake.
If it is, I hope whoever found it is making memories with it.
Because if there's one thing that old boat taught us, it's that the best fishing stories usually have very little to do with catching fish