Thanksgiving one year my younger sister, three of my cousins, and I headed out on an adventure. We were a bit bored while hanging out at my Aunt and Uncle’s place, so we bundled up in our winter garb, and went out to play in the snow. There was an irrigation canal running along the side of their property. During the spring, summer, and fall, this canal was full of flowing water several feet deep. During the winter, the water flow is cut off, and the canal dried up. We decided to take a walk down the middle of the canal, which at that point resembled a snowy, dry, riverbed. As we headed around down the canal, leaving five sets of fresh tracks in the snow, we discovered several patches of ice under the snow. We all began to search for our own little ice patches to slide around on. Suddenly we noticed something was moving under the ice beneath our feet. At first, we were freaked out, but as any normal five, six, seven, eight, and nine-year-olds, we were more curious than we were scared. We all grabbed sticks and began breaking the ice. As we broke through the ice, we made an extraordinary discovery. All the places that were covered in ice, where little holes and dips in the riverbed; not only were these dips and dents in the ground fill with water, but many of these holes were also filled with fish! Some fish were a few inches long, but most of them were over a foot long. These poor fish had gotten stuck as the water level continued to fall, until they couldn’t ‘swim away’. We decided it was our job to recue those stranded fish that had no food and whose ‘home’ was freezing and shrinking. We grabbed a couple oat buckets, several sticks, and began to save the fish. After filling one of the buckets with a variety of fish, our next issue was to find a place to put all these sad fish. My cousin brought to our attention that the horse’s trough never freezes over and would make a fantastic fish tank. My uncle had taken an old-fashion cast-iron bathtub and used it to water the horses. We spent the next few hours running from the canal to the tub, loading fish in the tub as fast as we could, trying to rescue the biggest fish we could find. As the sun began to go down, we began to get cold as our clothes got wetter and wetter, and our fingers became numb. We headed into the warmth of the fireplace and began to tell the rest of our families about our great adventure. My uncle wasn’t too happy with us filling the watering trough with fish, but he was kind enough to keep his frustration to himself and allowed us to celebrate the success of our rescue mission.
As an adult I look back on times like this where we as kids could make an adventure out of nothing. This day we found so much joy in our ‘work’. We had a job to do, and we took our job very seriously. In this great adventure, we learned so many things. We learned how exciting it was to catch fish in a small area with your hands. We learned how great it was to brainstorm and use everyone’s ideas to make the best plan. We learned how much fun we could have working together for one cause. We enjoyed saving the fish and giving them a second chance on life. That day, we found a way to have fun out in the snow and came up with something fun to do, when we were bored. We had so much fun working very hard moving the fish from the canal to the trough.
“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil.” Ecclesiastes 2:24a
