Ah...the 4th. Such a wonderful, happy, exciting time...as long as you don't lose anyone.
My Dad flew in from Pennsylvania for a week and a half to visit me on the 4th holiday. My husband and I, my Dad, my father-in-law, brother-in-law, one of our friends, and a bunch of my father-in-law's friends went out to Trinity Lake on the 4th of July for a day on the water and fireworks that evening.
Our friend who wasn't very familiar with the territory, since he is not from the state, decided to get himself lost. When you get a bunch of people out on boats and waverunners on the lake, there is most definately alcoholic beverages aboard one if not all boats. We had two boats out there. Brian, our friend, had had a few while kicking back with the rest of the people on the boats, so he was a little tipsy by the afternoon. About 2:30pm he decides he wants to go to shore because he's feeling a little sick. You have to understand, this is a guy who is 25 years old, does not have any money on him because he has asked me to hold it for him, has no cigarettes, no ID on him, and he jumps off the boat with three beers in his hands. That's it.
After getting in the water he decides he can only carry two beers and throws one back in the boat, then heads for the shoreline. Law says that you have to have all waverunners off the water by dark and being the people we are we usually abide by that rule. 5:30 rolls around and our group decides to pack everything up and head for the boat ramp. No one's seen Brian since he jumped off the boat.
We get the boats and three of the waverunners off the water. One person in our group goes back on a waverunner to see if he can find Brian. He comes back 20 minutes later without a passenger. Another person in our group goes back to the beach in a vehicle. He comes back empty handed too.
Our group is setting up in the spot we will watch the fireworks from and still Brian has not shown up. Being that Brian is our friend, my husband and I decide to take off and look for him. We take his truck up to the closest store we can get to and walk the rest of the way to the beach. We start by looking around the area where we last saw him. No luck.
This is the scenerio. It's dark, there's about 10,000 people on the beach, and there's live bands playing. Everyone's waiting for the fireworks. There's no way we're going to find him in the crowd, and we can't even call out for him because of the music. We walk back to the truck.
My husband makes a drive by of his dad's house, thinking maybe he showed up there, but there's no one there. We regroup with everyone back out at the lake, and the fireworks are over by now. Everyone loads up and goes to my father-in-law's house.
My husband and his dad take Brian's ID and hit every bar and store around the area. No one's seen him. They stop by the sheriff's office but they don't want to do anything til morning. They come back to the house, decide they can't do anything until morning, and we all go to sleep.
It's 9am the next morning, my husband wakes up with the intent to continue the search. He walks over to his dad's house to check things out. Brian is sitting there on the living room couch, just big as day. All my husband could do was flip him the bird and walk out the door.
He had spent the night in the back of a truck in a car lot owned by a friend of the family then walked down the road to my father-in-law's house in the morning. It was unreal. I really thought we were going to find him floating in the lake and I was trying to figure out what we were going to tell his mom. "Well...he came down here to visit...but...he's not coming back..." Yeah, it sounded really lame to me too.
I've never had the experience of losing a person before. Dogs and cats, yeah. People is a whole different ballgame. Skip the chance if you get it.
On a different note, I had lots of fun with my Dad. We got matching tattoos, saw the movie War of the Worlds, which by the way is excellent, and just hung out. It was long overdue and much fun.
Texas_chic signing off.
