Kalle Wessel has never seemed to me like the kind of man who could die. He is 6-foot, 5-inches tall, with shoulder-length silvering hair and hands that dwarf a can of beer. And he has the capable and gruff demeanor of the lineage of Norwegian sea captains from whence he came. That’s why it was such a shock to me last summer when I picked up my phone to hear the news that he was in a coma.
The founder of Sweden’s Delta Powerboats was piloting a speedboat at 110 knots in Stockholm Harbor when something—no one knows what—went very wrong. The boat flipped, tossing two passengers and crashing down on Wessel and his co-pilot, who was paralyzed. Wessel himself spent the next seven weeks in a coma, and four more months after that in the hospital. “I am lucky to be alive,” he told me over a seafood lunch at a fish shack on an island in
