A father and his teenage son hesitated on a rocky ledge, peering at the clear blue water flowing out of a limestone cave into the cold, spring-fed Current River.
Michael Hamtil, 55, looked at his 13-year-old son, tilted his head and smiled.
They could do this.
“OK, ready. One, two, three!” he counted down.
They threw their arms up, held their noses and jumped into the 56-degree river, which felt even colder with a heat index in the Ozarks above 100 degrees.
Hamtil pumped his fist in the air before they quickly swam to the shore.
His wife, Lara, recorded the triumphant moment on her phone.
She had no idea how important that video would become.
After a long day canoeing and kayaking on the river, Michael looked down at his hand. His ring finger was bare. The silverly white, palladium wedding band he’s worn for 18 years was gone.
His heart sank.
“I immediately accepted that I would never see it again,” he said.
He had suggested this last-minute float trip over Labor Day weekend, in part, to escape the oppressive St. Louis heat wave. Hamtil, on leave from his job as the multimedia editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, remembers his own father taking him to the Black River in the ’70s when he was a kid.
“I wanted my wife and kids to see the most beautiful part of the Ozarks,” he said.
Now, his cherished wedding ring was lost somewhere in the 184-mile Current River, surrounded by majestic bluffs.
Lara started examining their videos and photos from the trip, zooming into the images. Michael had the ring on his finger when he jumped into the river. It was missing when he came out.
The wedding band had to be sitting in that crystal clear water at Cave Spring.
Her detective work prompted Michael to hike for two hours the next day with their son, Theo, to the same spot where they had taken that fateful leap. Michael got back in the frigid water.
“I froze to death in that water for 20 minutes, blind as a bat without my glasses, thinking I would get lucky and find it,” Michael said.
No such luck.
The lost ring tugged at him. He wanted it back as much for Lara as for himself.
The next day, he posted in a Facebook group for fans of Missouri’s scenic rivers. He shared the spot where he lost the ring and offered a reward for anyone who might be able to retrieve it.
Jason Simpkins, 48, of Hillsboro, knew that exact spot well. He had snorkeled there before and seen lost cellphones in the water. Jason reached out to Michael and said he and his brother, Tim, both certified mine divers, were willing to drive a couple of hours on Saturday to hunt for the missing ring.
Michael said the reward — $250 — would barely cover his fuel and expenses, but Jason said the Simpkins brothers were up for the quest anyway. Fifteen years ago, Jason had lost his own wedding band on the river.
Days later, Jason stood on the rocky ledge to guide his brother as Tim dove and used an underwater metal detector. Jason saw the indicator on the detector light up and his hopes rose.
His brother brought up a penny, then a dime or a quarter. Hopes dwindling with dive after dive, Jason was ready to call it a day. Tim decided to go down for one last look.
He came back up with a silver glint in his scuba glove.
“Is this it?” he asked.
Jason got instant goosebumps. He quickly took the ring from his brother, looked closely and saw “PD 950” engraved in it — 95% pure palladium.
“I think we’ve found it,” he said. The ring had gotten buried underneath four to five inches of silt and pounded into the riverbed. Tim dug up the dirt by the handful and used a sifter to find it.
As soon as he was able to get cellphone reception, he sent a photo to Michael, who was overjoyed by the generosity and effort that they had put into retrieving such a prized possession.
They met days later in St. Louis so Michael could put the ring back where it belonged. “I can’t thank you enough,” he told Jason.
That night, Jason received a Facebook message from Michael’s sister. She also wanted to thank him and Tim, and to share why it meant so much.
Michael is fighting an aggressive brain cancer, she said. He has gone through six weeks of chemotherapy and radiation.
Again, chills went up Jason’s arms.
Michael had never mentioned his illness — not in his Facebook posts, not in their messages and not when they met in person. The keepsake took on even more significance.
Jason was speechless. He had been thinking for weeks that he and his brother needed to get their gear together because they hadn’t been diving in a while.
“It was almost like something was telling me I needed to get prepared,” he said.
Michael will soon have an MRI to see if the treatment has helped shrink the tumor. His strongest motivation for the float trip was to create unforgettable memories for his family.
None of them will ever forget that his wedding ring, a symbol of everlasting love buried in a river, miraculously found its way back to him through the kindness of strangers.
Becoming, again, a symbol of what endures.
Aisha Sultan is a St. Louis-based journalist who studies parenting in the digital age while trying to keep up with her tech-savvy children. Find her on social media: @AishaS.