This summer Connor Halsa reeled in the fishing story of a lifetime when he went searching for walleye and got a wallet.
Inside there was $2,000 cash, wet and soggy, but nonetheless cold and metaphorically hard. Still, Connor and his dad agreed immediately they needed to find the owner.
Out on Lake of the Woods, the sixth-largest freshwater lake in the US—over 70 miles of water—Halsa and his dad were planning a ‘drift’ for walleye, and after casting their lines, Connor felt something decently heavy on the other side.
Reeling in fast, he found a brown billfold.
“My cousin opened the wallet up, and he said some words you probably shouldn’t say, and he showed everyone, and we took the money out and let it dry out,” Connor told WDAY 7 news.
Inside was a presumably soggy business card with a number on it and they used that to track down the owner—600 miles away in Iowa. Jim Denny lost it on a fishing retreat, but that was over a whole year ago if one can believe it.
The resort Denny was staying at had to advance him the stay on credit, embarrassing him terribly, and he suspected the wallet jostled itself loose in the choppy waters.
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WDAY 7 reports that Denny came all the way up from Iowa to Moorhead, Minnesota to reunite with the old billfold and the cash it contained. Young Halsa refused any amount of the cash inside, saying it was what any decent person would do.
“To meet people like that, who are that honest, I tried to get them to take the money, and they wouldn’t do it,” Denney told WDAY. “I would take Connor as a grandson any day, and I would fight for him any day.”
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The two also shared a moment to contemplate what the odds were of finding the billfold. Lake of the Woods is 1,679.5 square miles, half the size of Yellowstone National Park, and 210 feet deep in places. The water volume is measured in the tens of cubic miles, and in all that space, Halsa’s line managed to pierce the hide of a wallet just a few cubic centimeters; the phrase one in a million doesn’t even come close.
WATCH the story below from WDAY 7…
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Connor’s behavior is a concrete example of how we keep one’s faith in humanity. Connor can be proud of what he did always.