The Toyota pickup hit the tree that May morning with enough explosive force to leave a gash that is still visible on its trunk 39 years later. Inside the truck, the bodies of three teenage boys hurled forward, each with terrible velocity.

One boy died instantly; a second was found alive outside the car. The third boy, Ian Berg, remained pinned in the driver’s seat, a bruise blooming on the right side of his forehead. He had smacked it hard—much harder than one might have guessed from the bruise alone—which caused the soft mass of his brain to slam against the rigid confines of his skull. Where brain met bone, brain gave way. The matter of his mind stretched and twisted, tore and burst.

When the jaws of life freed him from the wreckage, Ian was still alive, but unconscious. “Please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die,” his mother, Eve Baer, pleaded over him at the hospital. She imagined throwing a golden lasso around his foot to keep him from floating away.

And Ian didn’t die.