Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

One Lived

The Columbus Dispatch printed a moving story this morning about the lone survivor of a shipwreck in the Great Lakes -- Edmund Fitzgerald but with one saved from death. Excerpt: Almost immediately, Hale sensed that he was floating, circling above the raft. He then felt as if he were hurtling through space. "I remember spinning and traveling so fast that I was laughing out loud." Hale soon found himself standing on the forward deck of the Morrell. The ship was whole. His crewmates were there, too. "We were together again," Hale said. "We were childlike, laughing, at peace with the world."

Hale said the men walked into the ship’s engine room, where George Dalton, the ship’s third engineer, was climbing down a ladder.

"He walked up to me and said, ‘Dennis, it’s not your time yet.’"

At that point, Hale said, he was sucked back through space, to the raft where he and his lifeless crewmates drifted in the cold.
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"There had been ice all over him," Dr. Oakes said, reflecting on Hale’s arrival at the emergency room.

His body temperature was so low that it didn’t register on a thermometer.

"It was the coldest I ever felt anybody that was alive," Oakes said, noting that he and his hospital colleagues used every hotwater bottle they could find to help restore Hale’s temperature.