"The world has focused down to this tableau, this small bay on a remote northern lake that has been free of ice for for less than a month. This wind-lashed sunny afternoon with four people, two canoes, and things gone irrevocably wrong. There is nothing else - no wider world, no families, no plans, none of the passions that seemed, minutes ago, to drive our lives. Only the next wave, the target of color, the screaming wind, our labored breathing."

An over-turned canoe on a Canadian lake.

"Consequences," Alan Kesselhelm. From "Rescue: Stories of Survival From Land and Sea," Edited by Dorcas Miller, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000.