On January 17 of 2018, I was standing on the edge of a frozen lake near my home in Maine. In front of me were snowmobile tracks that disappeared into the blackness of the frigid night. I knew that my 13-year-old daughter, J., was a passenger on that snowmobile; and I had just received word from local firefighters that the tracks ended in open water.

That’s it, I thought. I’ll never see her alive again.

As I fought a wave of dread and grief, I began to think how I would break the news to my wife, who was stranded at LaGuardia airport in New York, trying to make her way home, and who was expecting me to call her with news of our missing girl.
Hours earlier, J. had gone snowmobiling with Portia, her best friend, and Aaron, Portiia’s dad. They were supposed to be back before dusk, around 4 pm, but now it was 6:30 and no one had seen them. A search-and-rescue operation had been launched more than an hour earlier. Members of the Maine Warden Service and about two dozen volunteer firefighters had sprung into action and fanned out across the area.
Twice, news crackled over responders’ radios that a light had been seen moving through the trees, and that yelling had been heard. But those pinpricks of hope turned out to be false. The lights and voices belonged to other people in the search party. J., Portia, and Aaron had been swallowed by the stygian darkness. The temperature was 25˚ Fahrenheit and dropping.

The worst moment came when I heard someone on the first responders' radios say something about "bodies." My knees buckled and a desperate sob rose from deep within. The guy whose radio I'd heard tried to reassure me; "bodies," he said, referred to extra people who'd just arrived to join the search.
Finally, close to 8 pm, we got news that had seemed increasingly impossible with each passing minute. The three had been located, and they were alive. After they’d crashed through the ice, they had apparently managed to swim ashore, then climbed onto a cliff to get a better sense of their location.
Hypothermic and dizzy with fatigue, they were extracted from the treacherous site by firefighters using specialized hoisting equipment. Ambulances then took them to a hospital 20 minutes away, where they made a speedy recovery.

I'd never been so grateful and relieved in all my life.