Cold Air. Then Heat. Then Terror.
A fire in Prince George’s County in Maryland nearly kills two firefighters. An account of how it happened:
“With temperatures climbing past 1,000 degrees, the shield on his helmet curled, and the liner inside his protective coat melted. His protective mask was so badly damaged that an analysis later concluded that it was on the verge of ‘immediate failure.’
“‘Everything was hot, everything was burning,’ O’Toole said. ‘It got hotter and hotter and hotter until the point where you just didn’t want to breathe anymore.’ Each breath he took ‘felt like someone was cutting your throat.’
“Outside, Sorrell was crying for help, desperate to save his friend. ‘Come on! Get that line in there!’ he shrieked, a bloodcurdling sound captured on a helmet-mounted video camera worn by a Riverdale firefighter. ‘My guy’s in there! Go!'”
In D.C., Bullets Leave Another Child Fatherless
David Robinson grew up in Washington D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood where young men often died in street violence. He tried to escape it, but ended up dead at 19. “His killing, still unsolved, is the story of gun violence in Washington”:
“‘I told him, “Guns don’t make you a man!” I told him, “Guns make you a coward!” And he was like, “Unc, man, I know, I know, but these dudes out here, they’re carrying guns, talking about they’re going to do this, they’re going to do that.”
“‘He was like, “Unc, it ain’t safe out here.”‘”
Inside the Life of the Man Known as the ‘Spark Ranger’
The life and death of Roy Sullivan, a park ranger for Shenandoah National Park who was struck by lightning seven times:
“A gentle rain fell on April 16, 1972. The Spark Ranger was in a small guardhouse atop Loft Mountain, registering carloads of visitors who were arriving at the campground. Not so much as a coo of thunder riffled the air. Then … KABOOM! Lightning annihilated a fuse box inside the guardhouse. ‘The fire was bouncing around inside the station, and when my ears stopped ringing, I heard something sizzling,’ Sullivan told a Washington Post reporter who contacted him a week later. ‘It was my hair on fire.'”
In Rural Tennessee, a New Way to Help Hungry Children: A Bus Turned Bread Truck
Taking the fight against child hunger on the road:
“The driver’s name was Rick Bible, and his 66-mile route through the hills of Greene County marked the government’s latest attempt to solve a rise in childhood hunger that had been worsening for seven consecutive years.
“Congress had tried to address it mostly by spending a record $15 billion each year to feed 21 million low-income children in their schools, but that left out the summer, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to spend $400 million more on that. Governors came together to form a task force. Michelle Obama suggested items for a menu. Food banks opened thousands of summer cafes, and still only about 15 percent of eligible children received regular summer meals.
“So, earlier this year, a food bank in Tennessee came up with a plan to reverse the model. Instead of relying on children to find their own transportation to summer meal sites, it would bring food to children. The food bank bought four used school buses for $4,000 each and designed routes that snake through some of the most destitute land in the country, where poverty rates have almost doubled since 2009 and two-thirds of children qualify for free meals.”
A Coach’s Painful Farewell to a Rugby Program He Built and the Players He Loves
The coach of one of the only all-black rugby teams in the nation says goodbye to his team:
“‘Rugby, to me, is life,’ said Cecil, who hopes to play in college and for the U.S. national team. ‘All I dream about is rugby, all I play is rugby, all I think about is rugby, all I watch is rugby.’
“Bayer wasn’t ready to tell Cecil and his teammates that he was leaving. Not yet.
“‘There are moments in this office where it’s a lump in my throat. Kids are talking about next year. I want to tell them,’ he said, ‘but it’s not the right time. I don’t want kids to go, “Screw it, if he’s leaving, I’m done. I’m not coming back to school next year.”‘”
After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet
Nearly six months after the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, the family of one of the victims, 7-year-old Daniel Barden, grapples with what’s next:
“Daniel Barden. Seven. Dylan Hockley. Six. Ana Marquez-Greene. Six. Six. Six. Six. Seven. Six. How long could one minute last? Mark looked at the lawmakers and tried to pick out the three who already had refused to meet with the Newtown parents. Could he barge into their offices? Wait at their cars? Jackie counted the seconds in her head — ‘breathe, breathe,’ she told herself — believing she was holding it together until a lawmaker handed her a box of tissues. Hockley saw the tissues and thought about how she rarely cried anymore except for alone at night, unconscious in her sleep, awakening to a damp pillow.”
A Mother Helps Son in His Struggle With Schizophrenia
A week in the life of a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia and his mother who is caring for him:
“It has been 10 years since he began thinking his classmates were whispering about him, four years since he started feeling angry all the time, and two years since he first told a doctor he was hearing imaginary voices. It has been 20 months since he was told he had a form of schizophrenia, and 15 months since he swallowed three bottles of Benadryl and laid down to die, after which he had gotten better, and worse and, for a while, better again, or so Naomi had thought until an hour ago, when they were in the therapist’s office and Spencer said that his head was feeling ‘cloudy.’
“‘Wait —’ she said, interrupting. ‘You described it as a cloudy feeling?'”
A Mother’s Story: The Moon to His Sun
From the late Marjorie Williams, the story of her own mother’s life and death:
“It was only in secret that she was queen of her own domain. It was the land of late at night, when I would hear her downstairs, moving quietly around her kitchen, straightening a thing or two in the living room, then back to the kitchen. Clink, went her ashtray on the counter, as she stood at the sink to start the dishwasher. Chrhissshh, went her Bic as she lit another Carlton. She sipped from her glass of cranberry juice and soda, which might or might not also contain an illicit jolt of vodka. It was the world of the kitchen, where she made such bounty that you never thought to wonder at the fact that it required her constant removal to a part of the house where she was alone.”
The Prophets of Oak Ridge
Three peace activists—one of whom was an 82-year-old nun—penetrated a U.S. nuclear-weapons facility. The story of what happened to the trio, and those involved in the incident:
“When told that Sister Megan thinks he saved her life by not escalating the situation — that, in fact, he was her salvation — Kirk is speechless. His wife is not.
“‘That’s amazing that she’d make that kind of statement,’ scoffs Joann Garland. ‘She is safe — because of him — to be able to go and do what she’s doing. . . . The joke of it is they came in God’s name. God does not say to break laws. Sorry. God does not say that.'”
If This Was a Pill, You’d Do Anything To Get It
A Medicare experiment is facing possible shutdown, despite its proven effectiveness. The secret? It’s nurses making frequent house calls to those with chronic diseases:
“But Health Quality Partners, with its emphasis on continuous nurse-to-patient contact, did work. Of the 15 programs, four improved patient outcomes without increasing costs. Only HQP improved patient outcomes while cutting costs. So Medicare extended it again and again — now it’s the only program still running under the demo. But Medicare has notified Coburn that it intends to end HQP’s funding in June.
“Medicare’s official explanation is carefully bureaucratic. ‘The authority that CMS had to conduct this specific demonstration, which predated the health care law, did not allow us to make the program permanent and limited our ability to expand it further,’ says Emma Sandoe, a spokeswoman for the Centers on Medicare and Medicaid Services. ‘As we design new models and demonstrations, we are integrating lessons from this experience into those designs.'”