The Other Side of Suffering by John Ramsey

Author:John Ramsey [Ramsey, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780892965595
Publisher: FaithWords

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I was in the ninth grade when I first met Jon Jones, a boy my age who lived down the shoreline from our summer cottage at Lake Mecosta. My mother loved him like a son and thought for sure he would be an asset to the world someday, a young man destined for success, and everyone agreed. Jon was an all-American boy, and kind to a fault.

Jon had an uncle who had a small float plane, which he flew to a cabin he had built on a remote fishing lake far up in Canada, and one summer he invited Jon and me to come up to fish. We were so thrilled you would have thought we’d been invited to have lunch with President Kennedy. We packed up our fishing gear and made the eight-hour drive into southern Ontario, ending with a two-hour drive along a dirt road through dense pine forests to Uncle Sonny’s cabin. The next day, we climbed aboard his small Piper float plane, and flew farther up into northern Canada to a remote lake.

Uncle Sonny dropped us off on an island in the middle of a pristine aqua green lake surrounded by a thick wall of pines and home to millions of mosquitoes. We were set for two days of fabulous fishing, Jon and I, outfitted with our tent, fishing poles, frying pan, matches, candy bars, flashlights, and mosquito repellant. We watched Uncle Sonny’s plane take off and disappear, leaving us on our own, and I had my first taste of true isolation. The roar of the small engine vanished into the late afternoon sky. and we became surrounded by numbing silence.

In the next two days we stood on the rocky banks of that island and cast our red devil spinners out into the water and caught more northern pike than we could count. We ate a few, frying them in butter, and the rest we released back into the lake. Chewed up by mosquitoes, we weren’t sad when we heard Uncle Sonny’s plane humming toward us to take us back to civilization.

Over the next summers, Jon’s mom and my mom each “adopted” the other boy, so we moved between cottages as if each were our own home. My mom affectionately referred to Jon as her third son. We continued to be close friends after high school graduation, and eventually he married one of the few cute girls at Lake Mecosta. They promptly had three children and I figured he had an ideal life, a good wife, great kids, and a great job at Dow Chemical. Like my mom, I still believed Jon was destined for long life and greatness.

I was wrong.

Early one summer morning, leaving his wife and kids at home, Jon and Uncle Sonny returned to that same remote lake where we had fished as boys. After fishing for a couple of days, they packed up to leave the island. Uncle Sonny’s small Piper float plane accelerated on the water for lift-off, but it hit a submerged log.

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