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deep enough to fully submerge the entire tractor. The top of its roof was visible just a few inches below the surface.
    It had been warm in the tractor cab while he was plowing, so Campbell had taken off his coat. He was sitting there in his T-shirt, sweat pants and boots as the icy water started to seep into the floor of the fully enclosed tractor cab.
    â€œI was sitting there, with it stuck the first time, and I’m kind of shaking my head, thinking how stupid this is when the whole thing suddenly crashed to the bottom,” Campbell said. “When I saw the water coming in on the floor, I thought, ‘Shit, this could be serious.’ But I wasn’t panicked at that point. I figured I’d be able to get out somehow. So I tried to open the door, but it was shut tight. There was, I guess, too much water pressure on the outside and it wouldn’t open. So I put my gloves back on and tried to punch out the window, but it didn’t budge. The water was starting to fill up a lot faster now. It was up to my knees and I realized, ‘I could be in real trouble here.’ I tried punching out the door and windows again. All of them. Really hard. I tried kicking them out. I don’t think I had time to physically panic, but now I was really panicking on the inside. Once the water started to come in, it was really rushing up quickly. It wasn’t long before it was over my head. I’m trying to lift my head to get the last bit of air that was left at the top of the cab. Then it was filled up completely. That’s when I thought, ‘I’m going to die in here.’”
    With his lungs literally ready to burst and a most horrific death seemingly imminent, floating on his side, that was when Campbell experienced the dual visions—of his wife, Heather, watching the morbid salvage operation from the edge of the pond and his own funeral procession up on the county road.
    Even now, Campbell’s a little unnerved by them; how lifelike they both seemed, how it was an almost out-of-body experience for him at the precise moment he was drowning, but there’s no doubt those visions inspired him to give one last kick for freedom.
    A kick that saved his life.
    â€œI’ve been told since then that the window probably popped out when I kicked it the last time because, once the cab filled up with the water, there was equal pressure on both sides of the glass,” Campbell said. “That makes sense. Still, I’m glad I wore those big Roots boots, because I had thought about wearing running shoes instead, and I don’t know if I would have been able to kick [the window] out with shoes on.”
    Once out of the cab, Campbell bobbed up to the surface, but the jagged edges of the hole in the ice the tractor had fallen through cut his head in numerous places. He was able to grab onto the just barely submerged tractor arm that led him onto the big bucket, which he crawled over to get to solid ground.
    The weird thing, Campbell said, was that at no time during the entire ordeal did he ever feel cold or think about the cold. Not when the icy water was rushing over him in the cab, not when he was swimming up to the surface, and not even when he scrambled up to the field in his water-soaked clothing on a below-freezing day and walked the better part of half a kilometre to the house.
    â€œI was probably in shock, but the cold never registered, not in or out of the water,” he said. Yeah, it was probably shock. Or the fact that, as a hockey player, Campbell was tougher than a two-buck steak. Don’t forget, we’re talking about the father whose son, Gregory, had gained NHL-wide acclaim and universal respect for playing a shift on a broken leg suffered when he blocked a shot against Pittsburgh in the 2013 Stanley Cup playoffs, still managing to leave the ice under his own power. So perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised when the father, after a near-death experience, plodded