Eighty Strangers Form a Human Chain

On a Saturday evening in July 2017 at Panama City Beach, Florida, two young boys got caught in a powerful rip current. Before long their mother, their grandmother, and others were caught too, until nine people were struggling to stay afloat and gulping seawater. Derek Simmons and his wife Jessica, who had been having a family picnic, saw the trouble. Beachgoers started linking arms into the water, and soon about 80 strangers formed a chain stretching almost 100 yards. Simmons and his wife swam out on boogie boards and passed the swimmers back along the chain one by one. The grandmother had a heart attack in the water but survived. “It was a wave of humanity,” Simmons said.

The Little Ships of Dunkirk

In late May 1940, more than 300,000 British and French soldiers were trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk with the German army closing in. The beaches sloped so gently that big warships couldn’t get close, so the British Admiralty appealed to the owners of small boats for help. Small boats of all kinds crossed the Channel to ferry soldiers off the sand to the larger ships. Between May 26 and June 4, more than 338,000 men were rescued. Winston Churchill called it a miracle of deliverance. The rescue happened because ordinary people with ordinary boats answered the call.

Pando, the Trembling Giant

In central Utah, on the Fishlake National Forest, there’s a grove of quaking aspen that looks like a whole forest. It’s actually one living thing. Scientists named it Pando, Latin for “I spread.” More than 40,000 trees over 106 acres all grew from a single seed and share one massive root system, sending up new shoots as it spreads. Together they weigh nearly 13 million pounds, which may make Pando the largest organism ever found. The individual trees come and go, but the root system has been alive for thousands of years. When the wind blows, the whole grove trembles and rustles together.

Can We Have Two Golds?

At the Tokyo Olympics in August 2021, high jumpers Mutaz Essa Barshim of Qatar and Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy were dead even after two exhausting hours. Both cleared 2.37 meters, and both missed three times at 2.39. They could have gone to a jump-off to decide one winner. Instead Barshim turned to the official and asked if they could have two golds. The official said yes, if they agreed to share it. They looked at each other, hugged, and celebrated together. Both men had fought back from serious injuries, and Tamberi had kept his old cast from 2016 with “Road to Tokyo 2020” written on it.

Roger Bannister Breaks the Four-Minute Mile

For years people said running a mile in under four minutes was beyond what the human body could do. Roger Bannister was a 25-year-old medical student who trained around his studies. On May 6, 1954, on a windy late afternoon at the Iffley Road track in Oxford, two friends, Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, paced him through the first laps. On the final lap Bannister took the lead and ran with everything he had. The time was 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. He wrote that he felt “like the moment of a lifetime had come.” Then, he said, “I grabbed Brasher and Chataway, and together we scampered round the track in a burst of spontaneous joy.”