On May 1, 2023, a small plane went down in the Colombian Amazon. The mother and two pilots died, but four children, ages 13, 9, 4, and 1, survived the crash and wandered into the jungle looking for help. For weeks soldiers and Indigenous volunteers searched, finding a tiny drinking bottle, scissors, a hair tie, a makeshift shelter, and little footprints. On the 40th day the radio crackled with the code words: “Miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle.” All four were alive. Their family said 13-year-old Lesly had grown up knowing which fruits were safe and how to care for a baby, and she kept her younger siblings going until help came.
In April 2020, during Britain’s first COVID lockdown, a World War II veteran named Tom Moore set out to walk 100 laps of his garden in Bedfordshire before his 100th birthday. Each loop was about 82 feet. His goal was to raise 1,000 pounds for NHS charities. People were so moved that donations poured in from everywhere, and in the end he had raised almost 33 million pounds. He became Captain Sir Tom, and his simple saying, “Tomorrow will be a good day,” spread across the country. He died in February 2021 at 100, remembered as a beacon of hope.
Paul Alexander caught polio in 1952 when he was just six years old, and within days the disease left him unable to breathe on his own. He spent the next 70-plus years in an iron lung, a seven-foot metal cylinder that pushed air into his lungs. Most people would have quit dreaming right there. Paul didn’t. Holding a rod in his mouth, he learned to turn pages and paint. He went to high school, college, and law school and worked for years as an attorney. Later he used that same mouth rod to type out his own autobiography. When he died in March 2024, a friend said Paul would want everybody to know they are capable of great things.
In November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in existence, started sending home gibberish. Engineers figured out that one memory chip in an onboard computer had failed, taking some of the spacecraft’s code with it. They couldn’t fly out and replace a chip, so they rewrote the code in pieces and tucked it into other spots in the computer’s memory. Every command took about 22 and a half hours to reach the spacecraft and another 22 and a half for an answer to come back. On April 20, 2024, the team finally heard usable data again and celebrated in a conference room, and by June all four of its science instruments were working again.
Japan sent only two athletes to the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, and one of them was marathon runner Shiso (often spelled Shizo) Kanakuri. The trip took ten days by train, and race day was brutally hot. Partway through the marathon he collapsed and was taken in by a local family, and rather than face officials and admit he had failed, he went home without telling anyone. In Sweden he was officially listed as missing for more than 50 years. In 1967, Swedish television tracked him down in Japan and asked whether he would like to finish his race. At 75 he went back to Stockholm and crossed the finish line with an official time of 54 years, 246 days, and change. “It was a long trip,” he said. “Along the way I got married, had six children and 10 grandchildren.”
