14-year-old Connor Halsa of Moorhead, Minnesota was fishing with his family on Lake of the Woods, a massive lake straddling both sides of the US/ Canadian border.
“We were doing a walleye drift, so we stopped the boat, put some spinners on, and just let the waves take us.”
He hooked something in twenty feet of water.
Said Connor, who has just started his freshman year at Moorhead High, "I thought I had a huge fish, so I set the hook really hard."
What he hooked was a wallet caked in mud.
"My cousin Brandon, he opened the wallet up and he was like he said some words that you probably shouldn't say, and then he said there was some money in it, and he showed to everyone, and then we like took the money out and placed it all on the dashboard to like let it dry off."
$2,000 in cash.
He knew, instantly and instinctively, the next course of action.
Find who lost it and give it back.
Inside the wallet was a barely readable business card that belonged to Jim Denney, a farmer and livestock owner in Mount Ayr, Iowa.
The year previous, the boat that Jim was fishing in capsized, and though everyone was safe, he discovered that his wallet which contained his vacation funds gone.
Thus endith the fishing trip.
“The water was awful rough I was sitting on the back of the boat there and the boat was rocking back and forth pretty good and it just must of worked out of there and slipped off into the water.”
He didn't even realize it was gone until he was paying the bill to the resort.
Money, cards, everything… poof.
"They had to kind of float me the money for the whole deal I didn't have, that was the sunkiest feeling I ever been.”
And lo, on his first cast, Connor snagged it, which is amazing considering the lake is 1,727 square miles... 85 miles long and in spots 56 miles across.
And the wallet being four inches by three or thereabouts.
Jim of course was gratefully astonished.
Said Jim, "The odds of ever finding or hooking a billfold in 20 feet of water... I don't think there's a number."
He made the trip to Moorhead to meet the family personally, instead of them mailing him the wallet and contents.
He wanted to be face to face with Connor when he offered him the money as a thank you for keeping hope alive.
Connor turned it down, saying that he should not and could not be rewarded for doing what was right.
”…. we really didn’t work for that money. He did, so….”
Jim gifted him a personalized cooler and took the family out to dinner.
Said Jim, "To meet people like that, who are that honest, I tried to get them to take the money, and they wouldn't do it.
I would take Connor as a grandson any day, and I would fight for him any day."
The highest of accolades, indeed.
