It’s not every day that an item gets found after 35 years. And it’s even loss often when that item is a wedding ring lost in the banks of a lake.
But that’s exactly what happened when Rick Yost found his uncle’s lost wedding ring recently while up on a weekend visit to the Summer Village of Meawatha Beach.
It was 35 years ago that Oliver Kondratiuk had recently lost 40 pounds and decided to go for a swim at the cabin he built with his wife Terry. Oliver said all he remembered was taking one breast-stroke and the ring was gone.
“It was a summer after I lost a lot of weight and the water was cold so I guess it just slipped right off my finger like it wasn’t even there,” Oliver said. “I felt it come off but I couldn’t find it after that.”
In fact, Oliver and his family kept looking for it every time after that when they made their way back to the family’s cabin every weekend that summer. Oliver even had a friend of his who was a diver from Boyle come out to the lake with his diving gear and an underwater metal detector to look for it, but to no avail.
For 35 years, on and off, Oliver continued to look for the ring he had lost, though he got a new one shortly after. In all that time, Oliver’s memory of what it used to look like slowly started to fade, but one thing he knew for sure was that he had etched his own initials “OK” into the gold band himself.
“Every time we walked down to the beach it was always in the back of my mind and occasionally I’d take a look specifically for it,” Oliver said. “I always thought about it.”
Soon enough, 35 years had passed. Rick, the husband of Oliver’s niece Jana, had been going to Skeleton Lake, where Mewatha Beach is located, with his family on the other side for almost as many years as Oliver and his family had been going to the water – that’s how Rick met Jana. The lake seemed to bring them together over time and Rick started coming to Jana’s side of the lake with her family.
In the last couple of weeks, Rick had been putting in a new dock down at the waterfront near his cabin and his uncle’s cabin. One of the days he was out there doing some work and saw something glittering in the mud. When he went to go pick it up he saw that it was a ring. As a joke, Jana said he should go tell Oliver it was his. Turns out it was his ring after all.
At first, Rick wouldn’t tell him what the ring he found looked like and made Oliver describe it to him, given the nature of their friendly bantering relationship, according to Jana. All Oliver could remember was it was gold, had a small diamond in it, and of course, the personalized touch of the scratched initials. When Rick looked at the ring it had two out of the three details Oliver described, but he couldn’t find the initials.
Given that they couldn’t find the initials, both Rick and Oliver thought it wasn’t the lost ring so Oliver went back up to his cabin. Not long thereafter, Jana went down to the water where Rick was and took a closer look and she could actually see her uncle’s initials on the inside of the band clear as day so they went back to find Oliver and tell him the good news.
“If it wasn’t my ring, I told Rick he could have it,” Oliver said.
“Well if it had a big diamond on it and no initials I might have just (kept it),” chimed in Rick with a laugh.
“But when they came back and said they found my initials on it after all, it was quite a surprise,” Oliver said. “After so many years, it wasn’t something I ever really expected to see again and it was a shock to see the ring in front of me.”
The two men believe that over time, as the water level dropped and the banks receded, that the lost ring came closer to the surface. A quad may have turned up some dirt, and the glittering gold was easily seen by the keen young eyes of Rick, who is always on the hunt for a good treasure.
“What makes this so much more interesting, at least to me, is that these two (Rick and Oliver) have a real interest for sunken treasure and are always swapping stories,” Jana said. “So when Rick found this ring, it was really funny because it was a sunken, buried treasure but it was also a lost treasure of my uncle’s No one else would scratch their initials like that by hand and if it didn’t have them then it might have been someone else’s but it was his. It’s just funny how things work like that.”
Jana’s daughter Lauren said her cousin also lost a bracelet and a watch in the water more recently and Oliver said he might start looking for other treasure too, now that his ring was found.
“Well a friend of mine lost a really nice medallion while waterskiing a few weeks ago and since the bracelet was lost too, I might have to see what else I can find,” laughed Oliver. “You never know what there is out there.”
The water works in mysterious ways it seems. First the ring was lost, then Rick and Jana met and fell in love, then Rick found the lost ring. Despite losing his ring, Terry stuck with her man, who wears both his old and new wedding band today. In fact they have their 37th anniversary coming up in October. She noted that the ring may have been lost but she didn’t lose her husband and accidents happen. Oliver said in the end it’s only made them stronger and happier together.
“When Rick found my ring it was a total surprise and a shock and I never thought I’d see it again, but we always looked and it just goes to show that in time, good things happen to those who wait,” chuckled Oliver.
