I have never forgotten it.

In the worst days of my life, strangers gave me their time and their cold wet hours and their aching backs, asking for nothing, and though they did not find my family, they gave me something I did not have words for then and barely have now: the knowledge that the world, for all its indifference, will sometimes drop everything and wade into freezing water for people it has never met.

Divers went down into the cold murk again and again, surfacing with nothing, going back down.

Motorized rescue boats crossed and recrossed the lake in slow methodical lines, dragging, scanning, listening.