Here’s a follow-up story about meeting Jake and Hunter, who pulled me out of the Mississippi River last spring:

In March 25th’s Star Tribune, Frank Bures of Minneapolis wrote about his sudden canoe accident and near-drowning last spring on the Mississippi River. Today he recalls recently meeting his rescuers.

The day after I almost drowned in the Mississippi River last year, my fingers ached from the cold. My head felt thick, but at the same time my thoughts raced. I pored over the details: the way the canoe had tipped, slowly, then quickly; the shock of the freezing water; the struggle to get to shore. The sudden knowledge that I wouldn’t.

Then the red canoe, with two young men.

The rope.

The second chance.

I ran this chain of events on a loop, cataloging my mistakes and miscalculations. I tried to piece together a version of the story in which there was a good reason those two arrived at that exact moment. But no matter how I moved the pieces of the puzzle, they refused to take that shape.

For weeks I felt in limbo between two timelines: the one where I’d lived, and the one where I hadn’t. My mind toggled back and forth. It took nearly a month before I could accept the arbitrary terms of my survival. By then, the episode began to feel like something that had happened, rather than something that was still happening.

Read the rest here.