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12-year-old Houston and 10-year-old Hadley find themselves stranded offshore after the weather takes a turn for the worse on a paddle boarding excursion. The dropping temperatures and strong currents make their way home feel almost impossible, until the discovery of the family phone gives them a way to communicate with their mom, MeiLani, on shore, becoming a lifeline for them on their journey home. View shownotes at LDSLiving.com/thisisthegospel Follow us on instagram and facebook @thisisthegospel_podcast Transcript: Erika 0:03 Welcome to "This Is the Gospel" an LDS Living podcast where we feature real stories from real people who are practicing and living their faith every day. I'm Erika Free, one of the story producers, and I'm filling in for KaRyn today. I'm a huge homebody. I really like seeing new places, but my favorite moment is when I walk through the door and take my coat off after a long day or long vacation away from home. I feel like I have an unconscious meter in me that's always telling me how far I am and how long it will take me to get home. And I honestly think it started when I was a missionary in Japan. There was this rule in the missionary handbook that said we should always have enough cash on hand to get back to the mission home at anytime from anywhere in the mission. My mission was decently big, so it created this extra awareness in me of always tracking home base. I wish I could say that I always track my progress to my Heavenly Father and my heavenly home as much as I do the place where I actually live. I don't do that. But the story that I have for you today really got me thinking that maybe that's something I should do. It's told by some of our youngest storytellers yet. Houston—who's only 12—and Hadley—who's only 10—show their experience out at sea far from home. Whil MeiLani, their mom, tells us about her experience from the shore. We start with MeiLani, Houston and Hadley will join in later. Here's MeiLani MeiLani 1:22 So I was born in Hawaii, then I was actually raised in California. So I'm used to seeing the typical beach scene: the palm trees and the sand, like every picture you usually see of beaches is that type of beach. But 10 years ago, we moved to the East Coast. We live about three hours away from the beach. And these coast beaches are very different. There are these beautiful, I think they're called like fox tails and reeds that come up really—and these dunes that you go over and you take a long boardwalk out to the water, whether you're on ocean side or the sound side. The sound side doesn't have all the crashing waves. It's usually a little more peaceful, it's better for fishing, better, sometimes, for paddleboarding easy, that kind of things. Sometimes you'll see like oyster patches that they have a bunch of reeds. So very, very different than the West Coast beaches that I was raised on. We were headed to a friend's beach house to visit their property because we run Airbnb vacation rentals and so kind of to collaborate on that, but also to hang out with friends. We ended up bringing a couple of our family members. So it ended up turning from 14 people into about 30 people at this big house and we were going to be here for seven days. All seven days had pretty much rain and a little snow. So anytime we would see the sun, we'd be like, "Okay, let's go. Let's go it take advantage of the sun." So my sweet niece, her name is Dixie. Dixie went and took out two of my kids. Houston just turned 12 last week, and then also Hadley, who is almost about to turn 10, and then went out with one of our friends kids named Owen. Dixie is in her early 20s, so I felt like, "Okay, Dixie can handle this. Dixie can take those guys and all will be well. She's an adventurer. She's lived years in Alaska, like she can handle any sort of adventure." I totally trust her, 100 percent, that I was like, "Oh, okay, I'm down two kids, then I can totally go and hang out and just maybe I might actually read a book." So as I went down, and I was getting my book, and I was so excited because it's so fresh. It's never been opened, but it's sat on my book stand for many months. I started to open my book and thought, "You know what, you got to take your book to go be out by the kids." I looked out and I was starting to sprinkle a little and so I was like, "Uh, no. It's gonna get my nice, clean book all wet." So I was like, "No, I'm fine." Then once again, I had the thought of, "You need to go out and be by the kids." When this prompting came to me the third time, and probably because we had just been studying Martin Harris a couple of weeks earlier, I really felt strongly of, "Okay, how many more times? Youu can't, I'm not going to give it to you again." So I went straight and got my jacket on, left the book behind and headed out to see the kids. So I started down this long boardwalk and I can see them as I'm walking out. Each of them had their own paddleboard or kayak. So we had Dixie, we had Owen, who is 14 years old, and then we had Hadley and Houston. Just in the period of me starting this walk of what 60 yards, the rain started getting harder and harder and I swear it dropped degrees every second I walked and it was getting colder and colder with this rain. As they were out there, I saw three of them together and I saw Owen actually had kind of left them. So it kind of seemed as if Owen was like, "Peace out, I'm going back in. It's cold. This is no longer fun." And it's his house, so he's familiar with the terrain. I can see the other three. I'm terrible with distances, but maybe 50 yards away, we'll say. Okay, maybe maybe a little bit less, maybe like 40. But it was far enough that they couldn't hear me, especially with the pounding rain, and it was really, really windy. So if I yelled, they really couldn't hear me very well at all, if at all, and I was about to yell, "Are you guys okay?" Right at that moment, and by this time, Owen, I see, is right along the reeds on my side. So there's no sand, okay, this isn't a sand beach because we're on the sound side. So they're, he's paddling along the reeds because along the reeds, there's not very much current. So he, you could tell, was seasoned enough to know, ride it down the current, and then paddle back along the reeds. But that's when I looked out. And I saw, as I was, like, saying, "Hey! Hey!" and they weren't responding, couldn't hear me, I saw them getting out onto one of those big reed patches. I saw them put their arms around each other. I saw him put their arms around each other, and I could tell that they were starting to get scared. They were trying to starting to get nervous. I thought at that point, "Okay, well, hopefully, I've done something right because they're turning to prayer pretty early. So hopefully, hopefully, that will work, hopefully that we're the right direction. As they finish their prayer, I could see them hug and then release. During that time, I realized, "Okay, I've got to get, I've got to give them support. I've got to tell them, I've got to figure out a way to get the word out of just do what Owen did, just do it." And I'm trying to yell and they can't hear me. I'm trying to call Dixie's cell phone, and it's not working. By this time, some of my other family members are coming out because it is getting serious enough. I have my other niece there and she was so sweet, another Alaskan just that thinks that she can brave everything. She's like, "I'll go out there and I'll go rescue." Her dad came out and said, "No, I don't want you to go out there right now. Like, let's just focus on getting these ones back instead of losing another one." But that's when my brother-in-law, all of a sudden, his phone rings. He said, "I can't answer this right now. I don't recognize this phone number." I look over, and I see that that's our family phone number. That's our family phone number. And I said, "No, wait! You answer that. That's them! That's them!" The side note on this is I had very mixed emotions at this point because I was so so glad that they had a way to communicate. I was so excited as my mama bear instincts were coming out of I just want to, I just want to talk to you, I just want to be able to communicate to you, that I was so glad that I could finally get my message through. But then I was also a little bit ticked because just two days earlier, I had had a very good heart to heart with my 12-year-old son of, "This is our family phone. This is not your thinking-that-you're-already-a-teenager phone. This is not for you to text friends all the time. This is not for you to just use whenever you want. This is the family phone and you need to ask for permission before you use this." So I definitely had this, this the polar opposites of, "Yes, you did it!" But then at the same time, "Oh my gosh, he's not supposed to do that, but I'm so glad he did it." So I thought I had this lifeline. I thought I was gonna be able to talk to him. So I grabbed the phone, I started to talk to him. It didn't take long to realize that they couldn't hear us very well. We couldn't hear them very well. The rain was so hard. The wind was so hard when i when i was listening in the phone, all you could hear was whooshing with a little here and there. You could hear like one word of every three words. So we tried to tell him just to ride to the current just ride the current because if you rode the current down the sound so away from the ocean side, right? But it's going to go back out. This is an island. So there's another side to the ocean, right? But to go so that you don't go too far out we could see probably just over a mile down the water down the sound that there was a marina and at this marina where there's going to be boats to dock and stuff but there's also big tall logs like buoys but long logs that maybe you could go and catch on to one of those or something, okay. So we saw just get down there and we were trying to communicate this but this was really not getting through and we're like, "Even if you get to the marina, that's okay, we'll come pick you up." But then we were like trying to point and so we finally just said, "Just go to the dock," which was about 10 docks down there. Had a green roof. So as we were trying to kind of say this is the plan, this is what you should do. So they all get back in their boats and Dixie, poor Dixie, is walking back and forth on this reed patch that is full of those oysters. She's just walking back and forth like nothing and trying to move the boats in a different way. But also trying to decide at this point. I can see that she's questioning if all of them are functioning, you could tell that Hadley wasn't functioning so great. And she was stashing it so that, because Hadley couldn't function, she couldn't paddle on her own. So she was putting her Hadley into a boat that Dixie would be in charge of paddling. So Dixie could paddle Hadley's boat for her because she wasn't able to do it on her own. They just had to abandon it. That was actually still while we were on the phone. We could see Dixie tried to do that. To the point that Wayne and some of the other adults were like, "No, don't leave that over there. Like, this isn't our house. We don't want to pay for paddleboard, we don't want to lose it. So this is crazy weather. No, you have to take it." And bless Dixie's heart. I think that's when she on purpose hung up on us. As if to say, "You do not understand what I'm going through. I'm just trying to get me and these kids back safe, like that paddle board does not matter anymore." Hadley 11:20 l started getting scared when it started, actually like pouring. And we went into the like weeds. Houston 11:31 Dixie was like, "Okay, see that marsh area over there?" There's a, there's these two that are like 10 yards apart. And then there's this other huge one. And we're like, since that huge one's over there, Dixie is like, "The current is going to be a lot softer and easier to paddle." So we tried to trust her. And then we get pushed in. We were so slow because of the choppiness. We just couldn't get there in time, and then we were just stuck there and couldn't really do anything going upwards. We had to go down. Hadley 11:59 That's when I started panicking, when like we just got pushed towards the marsh. I just started panicking. But I was like, "Stay calm, Hadley." Then I couldn't stay calm because then I started really panicking, and I was crying and I was sobbing and I was horrified on what next is going to happen. And I was scared that we weren't going to be able to get back to the dock, even though it was only like 20 yards away. But like we couldn't like just go. And I was also scared that if we weren't trying to go, I would tip over because I it was really cold water. Houston 12:42 I agree. My two problems were we don't have a way to contact the—my three problems, I guess—we don't have a way to contact people. It's very cold. I'm not wearing shoes. I feel very cold, and it's hard for my muscles just to move because I'm so cold. Then if we tip over, that could make it a lot worse and a lot harder. So that's when we got out of our boats and we're kind of like just standing there thinking of a new plan. MeiLani 13:15 I almost had this self-evaluation of is this, "Should I be getting nervous?" And having this little silent prayer with Heavenly Father in this silent conversation of, "Should I be like calling authorities at this point?" Like is this, but I don't want to overreact. But I also wanted to give it the proper respect of however serious it was. So I had this conversation or the silent conversation of, "Okay, this is starting to get scary. I just wish I could talk to my kids." I just wish that they could hear me because if I was right there, I could, I could touch them. And I could look in their eyes and I could hold their little cute faces in my hands and be able to explain to them that it's going to be okay. But at this point, I couldn't do that. But I still have this peace of everything's gonna be okay. Which was great for me, but I could tell that they were not okay. I couldn't comfort them, which was really hard. It's really hard as a parent to be so close, but still not be able to do anything to help and to see them struggle and just to have to sit and watch them struggle. But then it was a few minutes later, I would say you know, as we were waiting and worrying and trying to decide what to do, that we did get another phone call from them. This time it was Dixie. At that point, they were starting to push off and starting to look like they were going in the right way. Dixie said, "Lani, I just don't know what to do. They're just not listening to me anymore. Hadley is not functioning, she's not going to be able to paddle. I'm having a hard time even pushing off because she's so nervous and scared." And I thought, "How can I help? I'm not there. I'm not going to be able to hold their face in my hands. I…
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