She was healthy and active, by all accounts — the kind of young person whose physical condition would later be cited as a factor in her survival.

The robustness that her age and health provided was not something she had cultivated in anticipation of any ordeal.

It was simply the baseline of a young person who had grown up in an environment that required physical engagement with the world.

She was dating a man named Paul, whose friend Wally Nelson would end up being the person who found her on that porch and drove her to the hospital.

The coincidence of those social connections — that the man she was dating was connected to a man who lived in the direction she chose to walk, that she knew where that man’s farmhouse was — was not a coincidence in the deep sense.