It was the outcome of ordinary decision-making encountering extraordinary bad luck — a patch of ice at the wrong moment, a distance that turned out to be farther than she thought, a coat and boots that were adequate for getting in and out of a car but not for a two-mile walk at 22 below.

The person those ordinary decisions happened to was ordinary, in the best sense of the word.

She was living her life in the way that 19-year-olds in small Minnesota towns lived their lives in 1980.

The extraordinary thing that happened to her was not a product of any characteristic that distinguished her from her peers.

She was simply in the wrong place, in the wrong clothes, at the wrong temperature.

And then she was alive again, by noon the following day, as if the ordinary world had reclaimed her from the edge she had briefly touched.