David was incandescent with some adventure, but he didn’t tell me where we were going until he drove straight through the lake access and out onto the ice road of Cathedral Lake.*

“Oh shit!” I unbuckled my seatbelt and rolled down my window. “David, you can’t drive to the islands. Ice around islands can be weak.”

I knew he’d survived tumbling two stories to a cobblestone street in Germany when he was five. When he was 18, he was at the helm of a sailboat in the middle of the night when a wave washed him into the ocean. Watching the boat skim away, no one aware he was overboard, he flailed his arm and just happened to catch a rope trailing behind the boat. He survived being a door gunner in Vietnam, engine malfunctions in his helicopters, and misdiagnosed Lyme’s disease. The man was unsinkable. But was I?