Into The Void
Dale Synnett-Caron
Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, 1836
Word Count 524
He loved fishing, french fries, eating hotdogs around the campfire.
He was bright, blond, six years old.
He went missing.
It happened in late spring 1972 at a secluded lake in rural Ontario, Canada. He was wearing an orange-striped shirt, blue jeans, and black rubber boots.
I was in grade five when he disappeared. I couldn’t sleep after our teacher talked about it in class; how after a week lost in the woods his face would be unrecognizable because of the blackflies and mosquitos.
Listening at my parent’s bedroom door, I heard them speculate about what happened to the missing boy. Mom whispered it must be a kidnapping—the paper said a psychic had reached out to the police about that—Dad, a hardboiled police officer, said it was likely a murder. I went back to my room and prayed someone would find him.
The boy had gone fishing with his father and two older brothers. He’d decided to follow the lake’s edge to another fishing spot. They’d watched him—the paper said—his rod slung over his shoulder as he made his way around the bend hidden by a weeping willow.
It weeps still.
Neighbors in the rural hamlet where the family lived told reporters they’d seen the dad and three boys pack up the car to go fishing that day. The mom came out of the house with a picnic basket bursting with sandwiches for them and a plastic jug of orange Kool-Aid.
Later, the paper said the lunch was found strewn about the lakeshore by bears, the orange Kool-Aid still sitting on a rock.
They didn’t find his body despite numerous drags of the lake, land searches by thousands of volunteers and the military, countless hours of questioning the family. The paper said the dad had followed the boy to the other fishing spot 10 minutes later. There was no trace of him or his fishing rod.
I sometimes think about the father that day. Did the world erupt into painfully sharp focus as he searched for his child? It was like that for me, decades later, when my toddler son slipped out of sight after I turned my back to pull a few weeds from the vegetable garden. Everything became vivid against the void: the ink-dark cows in the pasture, the incongruous cheeriness of our red barn. Unlike him, my panic lasted only a moment before I caught the flash of my son’s lime green coat under the plum tree, where he sat watching the birds.
A few years ago, a true crime digital reporter reinvestigated the boy’s disappearance. He’d be over 60 now—my age—with aches, pains, a grandchild or two to brighten his retirement.
I’m sure he’d still love fishing.
The podcast said the boy’s parents, now in their eighties, still endure ongoing pain without resolution. Did someone take him? To what end? Or did he fall into a deep crevice of shifting Precambrian rock, common in these parts, the bones of his small body and his fishing rod still wedged deep within the bowels of the earth?
No one has ever found him.
His name was Jack.
Dale is a writer, communications advisor and yoga teacher. When not working to keep her two bouncy dogs in kibble, she meditates, writes and rewrites from her home in the woods surrounded by wild creatures, outside Ottawa, Canada. Her work has appeared in Galaxy Brain, and Canada’s national newspaperThe Globe and Mail.