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The sky was still dark on a Sunday morning in late March when I set my new solo canoe on the surface of the Mississippi River. I’d been thinking about this moment for years, dreaming of all the places I could paddle once I got this boat. Now, I was finally ready to launch on its maiden voyage.

I strapped my dry bag onto the crossbar, checked my pocket for my phone (which was also in a small dry bag), and waded into the river in my rubber boots, just north of the Ford Parkway Bridge between Minneapolis and St. Paul. I slid the boat out. When I stepped in, I noticed that it felt unsteadier than boats I was used to. Then I sat down, started paddling, and forgot about it.

Spring had come early. The temperature the week before had been in the 70s, and the snow and cold felt like a distant memory, even though a week or so before ice floes had drifted past here. I knew the water was cold, but that seemed like more of an inconvenience than a threat.

The sun was rising. I paddled up the gorge section of the Mississippi, which runs between the high banks of the Twin Cities, with hills—cliffs, almost—on either side. To the east side, an owl called. From the west, another answered. I was in the middle of the city, but also very far from it.

Although I was a fairly experienced canoeist, I’d never owned, or even paddled, a solo canoe. I’d been to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness many times, and I’d worked as the trips director for a YMCA camp in northern Minnesota. A few years earlier, my wife and two daughters had paddled down 125 miles of the Mississippi together on a five-day trip.

I was careful. I always stepped along the midline. In all that time, I’d never tipped a canoe, and I had no reason to expect today would be any different.

The air temperature was 31°F (-0.5°C), but it didn’t feel that cold. As I made my way upstream, the wind started gusting out of the northwest, though I was protected by the west bank. I moved along, making good time, staying close to shore. But when I came to the Lake Street Bridge, I decided to go around a footing in the middle of the river before heading downstream.

As I moved out into the main channel, the wind grew stronger. The canoe was light Kevlar, and as I tried to paddle left, it kept blowing me right. So I reached out for a big “C” stroke to correct my course. As I did this, the bow came up, and the wind seemed to catch it from underneath. Before I knew what was happening, the canoe was tipping slowly at first, then faster. I tried to shift my weight back to the middle but it was too late. I was past the point of no return. I looked up at the underside of the bridge as I sank sideways into the cold water.

Submerged to my neck, I was shaken but still calm. “Okay,” I said out loud, “just get to shore.”

I knew this was dangerous, but I didn’t know how dangerous. I’d never heard of cold shock. I didn’t know about the mammalian diving reflex, where cold water on your face causes blood to move out of your arms and legs to your core. I didn’t know that in waters this cold, I only had between five and 20 minutes before my body started shutting down.

In fact, most of what I knew came from an essay I’d read long ago by David Quammen called “The Big Chill.” It was about a troop of Boy Scouts who had tipped their canoes in a glacier-filled lake. They all died. Quammen thought hypothermia had killed them, but the autopsy concluded they’d drowned. Quammen tried, and failed, to answer the riddle of which one had really ended their lives—the cold or the water.

Now, years later, I was about to come face-to-face with the answer.

I grabbed my paddle and swam. I held my canoe and kicked for shore. A mile or so downstream was a dam, so I knew if I let go of the canoe it would be destroyed, which at that point was still my greatest fear. But it was already too hard to pull, so I pushed it ahead of me. My boots kept slipping off, and each time I tried to pull them back on. Because how—was the small question in my mind—could I walk down the rock shore without boots?

Such are the mistakes we make in our final moments.

My body temperature dropped. My right boot slipped off one last time. I let it go, and it was gone. “Get to shore,” I told myself, trying to focus on the one thing that mattered. “Just get to shore.”

I made some progress. The bank got closer, but it was still at least 50 feet away. It wasn’t enough. I kicked harder. I pushed the canoe. After about 10 minutes I started getting tired. My face dipped under the water. As a strong swimmer, this alarmed me. I had a life jacket on, but my armpits hung on the straps while I struggled to keep my head up.

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