This Picture was taken at a lake house in south Georgia. It was a sweltering midsummer day and we were as bored as we could be. Stahler, Timmy and I sat near the shore, reminiscing on an amazing week on the lake. It was the day before we were to leave the next morning, we sat thinking of something to do when Stahler suggested just walking to a nearby shopping center. We hadn’t seen much civilization that week so we agreed. He said we would just have to walk around to the other side of the lake and through the woods to a road. We pack some food and grabbed our wallets and left in a hurry. We walked along the shore until the house was out of sight, then we encountered an enormous chain-link fence at least 10 feet high. We climbed it with ease, then another, smaller fence and found ourselves in a heavily wooded area. The area had no trails and was impossible to get through. Eventually we came across a gravel road that lead down to a dock and up to the road, however we headed down to see the dock. Timmy claimed to have left something behind and said he would run home and back, so Stahler and I sat on the edge of the dock and waited. We sat there for a long time, talking or admiring the scenery and the unrealistically green trees or the incredibly calm water.

When we finally saw Timmy close to us on the shoreline we stood up to walk back up to the gravel path. But the dock was not cleated together and we had drifted far into the lake. Stahler and I stood on a 4x4 foot wooden platform, staring at the enormous gap between us and the dock. We looked up at each other,held a straight face for as long as possible, then burst out in laughter. By now Timmy was standing at the dock staring out at us. We were stuck without paddles and if we tried to paddle with our hands we had to reach so far down, the platform started tipping. Swimming was out as we had our phones, so we ripped off one of the 2x4s that had started to rot away. We tried rowing with that but that was a no go. we had to sit on the edge to get the board all the way down into the water, when we did the raft started slowly sinking. So we begged Timmy to help and he said “Fine,God I have to do everything” and then he disappeared into the woods.  He came back about 10 minutes later with a tall, fallen tree. I was skeptical at first, I did not think it would reach us. So Stahler held my feet and i reached as far as I could and i got it. I looked up to see to faces of total defeat, i had pulled the tree out of Timmy’s hand. I held onto a tree that almost reached all the way to the dock. So again Timmy disappeared, he came back with another dead tree and tried hooking the tree that was now in the water. Eventually he got it and it was heavy, but we were pulled in. There we were jumping across a much smaller gap onto the dock we had stood on about an hour and a half earlier.

We got off the dock as soon as possible, I was done with my sea legs. Solid land was an amazing feeling, and so we kept walking,talking about our ultimate stupidity and reminiscing. At the end of the day i had been through a great ordeal and we had grown closer together.