May 7, 2026
Not Everything That Happened on My Lake Will Happen on Yours
My cousin Oliver had a very bad afternoon. Holly Anderson wrote it up for Grantland. What I can tell you is that she got the place right.
These embankments are rich with stories. Some of them sound too strange to be true.
This one is true.
My experience growing up on the lake was different from my cousin Oliver's. I fished from the bank with a rod and reel, not a compound bow. I caught largemouth bass before school. I may have jumped in once to land an eight-pounder on the fifth "last cast or we're going to be late" warning from my mother. I may have run inside, changed out of my soaking pants, and forgotten about the wet boxers underneath. It may have taken two class periods for them to dry.
**
But never, in all my years around that water, did I find myself with my manhood trapped inside the mechanics of a compound bow.
That distinction belongs to Oliver.
In 2015, Holly Anderson wrote the whole thing up for Grantland, and I'm not going to retell it here because she already did it better than I could. It is not safe for the office. It is also one of the funniest things ever written about my family.
You can read it here: Life's Rich Pageant: Meet a Florida Man
What I can tell you is that she got the place right.
This part of Central Florida is full of holes. Some are natural lakes. A lot of them are old phosphate pits, filled back in, grassed over, built around, and eventually treated like they were always supposed to be there. My family has been living and building on that ground for generations.
The lake behind the house is not really a lake in the postcard sense. It is rainwater in an old pit, held by clay, fill, pipes, roots, and whatever else time decided to leave down there. There are stories under that water. Washing machines that became fish habitat. A homemade water park. A dirt bike track shaped with a loader. A house that sank to one side when the fill washed out through an old mining pipe. A lot nobody should build on because it's full of the burned remains of an Albertsons.
And yes, somewhere in the middle of all that, Oliver had a very bad afternoon.
That's the funny part.
The useful part is this: the lakes we work on in Polk County are not always simple. The bottoms are strange. The water table is strange. The fill is strange. Seawalls fail in ways that don't always make sense on paper. Docks behave differently when the ground beneath them has a history.
We know that because we grew up on it.
We watched houses move. We watched water rise and fall through pipes nobody mapped. We learned where the bank holds and where it doesn't. We learned that what looks solid from the surface may have a story underneath it.
So when Horizon Marine builds a dock or seawall on your lake, we're not guessing from a spec sheet.
We've been standing on this ground our whole lives.
Some of us, thankfully, with our pants on.
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Central Florida is built at the edge of land and water.
Horizon Marine works where that history meets today's lakefront properties — docks, seawalls, shoreline protection, and permitted marine construction across Polk, Osceola, Orange, Hillsborough, and Lake counties. License #SCC131154313.
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