Born into slavery, young Booker T. Washington heard about Hampton Institute in Virginia and decided he would get there somehow, even though it was about 500 miles away. In 1872 he set out with almost nothing, walking and begging rides. When he reached Richmond he was out of money and slept under a sidewalk. He finally showed up at Hampton dirty and hungry, and the head teacher wasn’t sure about him. After a while she told him the recitation room needed sweeping. He swept it three times and dusted every bench, table, and desk four times. She inspected it, couldn’t find a speck of dust, and said, “I guess you will do to enter this institution.” He called that sweeping his college examination.
In the summer of 1988, wildfires burned across huge stretches of Yellowstone. Many people grieved, convinced the park they loved was ruined. Lodgepole pines make up nearly 80 percent of Yellowstone’s forests, and some of their cones are sealed shut with resin. Those cones won’t release their seeds until the resin melts at about 113 degrees Fahrenheit, which usually means a fire. The fire clears away the litter on the forest floor and opens the canopy to sunlight, just what the seedlings need. Decades later those burned slopes are covered with young forests again. The very thing that looked like the end is what released the next generation.
The Wollemi pine is so rare that it was thought to be extinct, known only from fossils, until 1994, when a park officer named David Noble rappelled into a narrow canyon in Australia and found trees he didn’t recognize. Only about 200 grow in the wild, all hidden in the canyons of Wollemi National Park. In the terrible bushfires of 2019 and 2020, the flames headed straight for them. A special team of firefighters set up an irrigation system to keep the trees wet, and air tankers dropped fire retardant around the groves. The fire swept through anyway. For days smoke hid everything. When it cleared, a few trees were charred and two had died, but the groves were saved.
George Washington Carver was born into slavery near the end of the Civil War. As a baby he was stolen along with his mother, and only he was brought back, sick with whooping cough. He was frail as a boy, and a doctor said he wouldn’t live to 21. But he had a deep hunger to learn. He walked eight miles to school, worked as a cook and a laundry man to pay his way, and was turned away from one college because of his color. At one point, he wrote, he lived on “prayer beef suet and corn meal.” In a letter about his early life he summed it up simply: “I trusted to God and pressed on.” He became one of the most respected scientists and teachers in America.
