Content Warning: Mentions of drowning and death
My best friend, when I was eight years old, we went camping in Oscoda and and we thought where we were was frozen over and spoiler was not frozen over the very surface was frozen but she walked onto the ice and she fell through and we found her three days later. She was dead. She had drowned. That was my first introduction with death. Actually, It’s kind of a morbid story, I am sure it’s not the light-hearted ones that I think are expected, but to her credit or to my parents’ credit. They did not know that we were out there. We were supposed to be on the shore and not go near the water. We were kind of having like a little picnic with another family that we’d met at the campground. and I being overly cautious, then and now, I remember saying “I don’t think this is really a great idea.” It doesn’t you know, my mom said it’s not it looks more solid than it is and neither of us were very small children. We were very very stocky overweight to be honest children and she, I don’t know what her plan was, I think she thought she could make it like a large slip and slide. Or a slip n’ bleed rather. Yeah, she took she just took off running and then kind of made like that diving motion you make on a slip and slide and she just crashed right through the surface. My parents and the other parents did everything they could. They tried to get rope, but she kind of she was flailing a lot. We couldn’t get her back to the hole. She was under the ice and she was kind of drifting away from the the hole where my parents couldn’t couldn’t grab her. They tried to grab her and my father wanted to go in and he couldn’t- he couldn’t fit through the hole and he was you know punching at the ice trying to make the hole bigger and it just it wasn’t making it bigger. You know looking back maybe we could have gotten something to make the hole larger but none of us- I mean, I was eight. My parents were freaking out. Everyone was freaking out. They called the police the police. I don’t remember how long it took for them to show up. It seemed like forever, but it probably wasn’t that long. And the flailing had stopped and I didn’t really understand what that meant. I think I thought she was trying to swim to another area. I didn’t really understand that she had drowned at that point. They couldn’t do anything. They did break holes in the ice to try to try to find her- holes around the initial hole. But they did we stay up there for a week. Her parents came up there to their credit. They never blamed my parents for for really anything. She had admittedly always been a kind of a runner. You’d tell her to stay somewhere and she took that as a challenge. And they did find her three days later.