When Mount St. Helens blew in 1980, it flattened about 135 square miles of forest and buried the ground under ash thick enough to bury a car. A couple of years later, scientists tried an odd experiment. They carried a few pocket gophers by helicopter onto the barren pumice and let them loose for about a day. The gophers did what gophers do. They dug, and in digging they churned up the old, rich soil and the helpful fungi buried far below the ash. Then the scientists took them away. Six years later, the fenced plots where the gophers had been were covered with about 40,000 plants, while the patches nearby were still bare.
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.
On January 2, 2023, in front of a national TV audience, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin made a tackle against the Cincinnati Bengals, stood up, and collapsed. His heart had stopped. Within seconds the medical staff were on the field, and assistant athletic trainer Denny Kellington, who had joined the Bills in 2017, started CPR. Doctors said Hamlin lost his pulse and had to be revived with CPR and a defibrillator, and that the quick response saved not only his life but his brain function. Head coach Sean McDermott said Kellington stepped up and took charge, and he credited him with saving Damar’s life.
Roberto Clemente was one of baseball’s greatest stars: 3,000 hits, four batting titles, two World Series championships with the Pittsburgh Pirates. In December 1972 a massive earthquake devastated Managua, Nicaragua, and Clemente led the relief effort from Puerto Rico. When he heard that supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers, he decided to fly along himself to make sure the aid reached the people who needed it. On New Year’s Eve, the overloaded DC-7 crashed into the ocean shortly after takeoff from San Juan. He was 38, and his body was never found. He could have stayed home and sent a check, but he chose to go.
In 1939 a London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton worked his day job and then spent his evenings arranging permits, foster homes, and money so that eight trains could carry 669 children, most of them Jewish, out of Prague to safety in Britain before the war closed the borders. He hardly ever talked about it, and for nearly 50 years the story sat in a scrapbook his wife found in their attic. In 1988 the BBC show That’s Life! invited him into its studio audience, and on a later show the host asked, “Does anyone here tonight owe their life to Nicholas Winton?” More than two dozen grown men and women sitting all around him stood up to thank the humble man who had saved them.
