Jean-Paul “J.P.” LaPierre is no stranger to long, strange trips. When he was young, he worked as a master pastry chef, then as a real estate agent. But at age 30, he discovered crack cocaine. Within months, he went from living in a penthouse to sleeping under a Massachusetts bridge, a bridge that happened to be on the route of the Boston Marathon. La­Pierre would watch the runners speed past, longing to take part, join the throngs, pull his life together. Marathons became a symbol and an ­inspiration—surviving for the long haul. This woman was run over by a truck and 10 months later she ran a half marathon.

When he got sober, about two decades ago, LaPierre started running in as many marathons as he could. To date, the 54-year-old storage facility manager has crossed the finish line 32 times. Without a doubt, his most recent race was the most memorable.

LaPierre had flown from Boston to Chicago last fall, sleeping in O’Hare Airport to save money. Early on the morning of October 13, he boarded the city’s Blue Line L to head to the Chicago Marathon. The train was full of energized marathoners. LaPierre took a seat next to a fellow runner and began chatting. Before long, LaPierre noticed a man who seemed to be homeless moving from passenger to passenger, asking for spare change. His demeanor struck LaPierre as “really weird,” especially the way he stared down anyone he felt hadn’t given him enough.

At the Cumberland station, several stops before the one for the marathon, most of the passengers suddenly fled the car. LaPierre, startled, rushed out to see what was going on, only to hear panicked people shouting that the man asking for money was, in fact, armed and robbing people.

Just then, the armed man himself exited the train car and hopped onto the next one. LaPierre followed him. “I could not walk away knowing there were innocent children and people just trying to get to a race,” he says.

The man was standing in the middle of the car when he turned and saw LaPierre, his head down, bull-rushing him. LaPierre plowed into the far larger and younger man, pinning him against the closed doors. “Once I got a few feet from him, I knew he wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to shoot me,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. The two men fought for the gun—and their lives.

“You don’t move!” LaPierre shouted, leaning into the armed man with his left side. The man tried shoving past him, but LaPierre muscled him back against the door, grabbing the gun and handing it to a passenger, who quickly walked it off the train.

But LaPierre wasn’t in the clear. The man had accomplices who now surrounded LaPierre and began to threaten him. His one chance to save himself, he believed, was to be more menacing than the bad guys. Looking at the original crook in the eye, he growled, “I’m a boxer. I’ll break your head in one punch!”

“Let me go!” the man begged. Then the police swarmed the train, and LaPierre let them take over. He had a marathon to run.

This was not the first time LaPierre has jumped into the fray. In 2015, he helped rescue a one-year-old and his mother from a car wreck. Last summer, he volunteered to search for a python that went missing from a backyard cage in Newton, Massachusetts. (He found it.) And a few years back, he helped foil a CVS drugstore robbery. “I just happen to be at the right place at the right moment,” he says.

LaPierre knows there’s more to why he’s become a serial good guy than that. “I’ve lived a hard life,” he says. “But I believe change starts within yourself. For the last 25 years, I’ve tried to make myself into a good man.” Next, read on about a man who helped people in need get toilet paper during the COVID-19 crisis. 

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The post After Living on the Streets, This Man Takes Every Opportunity to Help Others appeared first on Reader's Digest.

A dawning sun silhouetted the massive form of the freight train. Loaded with fuel, water, and sand for traction, the lead locomotive weighed in at 410,000 pounds—slightly less than a 747 jumbo jet. Even as it idled, conductor Robert Mohr could feel the diesel power rumble through the ground. If you like traveling by train, you’ll definitely want to look into these 15 of the most luxurious train rides around the world.

Mohr, 49, ran his eye along the 96 cars behind him and, for a moment, recalled why he’d always wanted to be a conductor. To him, there was beauty in the oversized machinery, and in having control over such tremendous power.

It was 7 a.m. on May 12, 1998. Mohr had already scanned a dispatch listing hazardous materials aboard the train. “We’ve got some gas with us,” he’d reported to his engineer, Rod Lindley, in the cab.

The presence of liquid propane gas would mean taking extra precaution when braking the 6,200-ton train. With explosive gas on board, a derailment would be disastrous. The rest of the cargo was mainly new automobiles, car parts, and coal.

After a final external inspection, Mohr jumped aboard. Slowly the train pulled out of the Decatur, Illinois, depot. They were headed east, into a sun that promised a beautiful day for their 172-mile run to Peru, Indiana. These are the most scenic train rides across America.

***

At around noon that day, Tila Marshall prepared to tackle some yard work. The 34-year-old single mother of four had planned to brighten up the front of her Lafayette, Indiana, home with flowers. It was a beautiful day for it, she thought, gazing past the houses across the street. Some 50 yards away, just visible through tall, swaying grass, railroad tracks glistened in the sun.

Marshall began working in a patch of soil. Sitting next to her, cheerfully running her hands through dirt, was her 19-month-old daughter, Emily. For a while, she kept turning to check on Emily, who played close at hand. Eventually, though, Marshall’s absorption in her work became total.

***

Comfortable inside the engine cab, Robert Mohr smiled as Rod Lindley switched on his side-board heater. The engineer was preparing lunch the way he often did—by using the heater as a stove. “Pork chops,” said Lindley with pride, carefully positioning a lump wrapped in tin foil. “Smoked them myself.”

Mohr and Lindley had 50 years of railroading experience between them, and they had a lot in common. Both had a passion for hunting and fishing, and both liked to swap stories of the outdoors.

Even more, they enjoyed talking about their families. As the radio crackled with dispatcher information, they’d laugh over the trials of raising kids.

Mohr and Lindley approached Lafayette at about 1:45 p.m. and slowed the train to the 25-m.p.h. speed limit. Lindley activated his flashing lights and warning bell. The two had been through the city hundreds of times, but they grew extra cautious rounding the first curve. Ahead, over just three miles of track, lay no fewer than 24 street crossings.

As the train came out of the curve, Lindley noticed a small tannish dot on the right rail about 150 yards ahead. He thought it might be a dog. Although it was against the rules to do so in Lafayette, he began lightly tapping his horn. “Come on, puppy, move,” he urged.

***

The toots of a train whistle startled Marshall from her garden reverie. That’s odd, she thought. They don’t usually blow the whistle through town.

She glanced over to check her daughter, and her heart skipped. Emily was nowhere in sight.

***

While Lindley worked the controls, Mohr stood alongside, staring ahead at whatever was lying on the rail. It wasn’t unusual for such objects to turn out to be a bunch of rags or other debris. Far less common were real emergencies, although Mohr had experienced a few accidents in his 23 years with the railroad.

Now, as the train approached within 100 yards of the object on the rail, Mohr looked intently. Then shock coursed through him.

“My God!” he yelled as a tiny face turned toward him. “It’s a baby!”

***

Tila Marshall dashed around to the rear of her house. She knew that Emily loved to play a game with her 11-year-old brother: the girl would run to the back yard while Zachary raced through the house to intercept her, causing squeals of delight. Marshall called out, “Emily! Emily, honey, are you back here?”

There was no sign of the little girl. Marshall ran to the front of the house, where Zachary was now standing. “Is your sister with you?” she asked Zachary.

“No,” he said, and ran into the house to look for her.

***

Lindley had an instant decision to make. Applying full emergency brakes with half the train still wrapped around a curve could cause derailment. But the terrible reality of the situation left Lindley no choice. He had to risk an emergency stop.

The train shuddered, and the wheels screeched in protest. Lindley lay on the horn and watched helplessly as the train continued to bear down on the toddler. He and Mohr felt successive jolts as the cars braked front-to-rear, each car crashing into the car ahead.

His unblinking eyes glued on the small figure before him, Lindley could do nothing now but pray.

***

Marshall was unable to focus, even as her legs turned to jelly and shook uncontrollably. Everything seemed unreal to her.

A wave of nausea overcame her. Yet she stood fixed in a hallway, unable to move. Zachary stood next to her crying, “Mom, I’m scared.”

***

As the train barreled forward, Robert Mohr acted on instinct. He yanked open the left door of the engine cab and stepped out onto a narrow walkway. He hurried to the front of the engine and crossed to the right side. He then stepped down to the lower portion of the walkway just to the rear of the train’s “cow catcher,” or plow.

The child was now just 40 yards ahead. Mohr frantically considered what to do. At this speed—still about 20 m.p.h.—a train this size would need another 150 yards to stop. There was no way they’d halt it in time. He winced as he imagined the plow hitting the little girl.

With fewer than ten seconds left, the baby rolled off the track and onto the outer tie. If she kept down, perhaps the right edge of the plow would pass harmlessly over her. But then she reared her backside up, preparing to stand. “No, no, baby, lie down!” Mohr yelled.

The train was down to 15 m.p.h. now, as the horn loosed its deafening howl.

With just the toes of his left foot on the walkway and his left hand clinging to the railing, Mohr stretched out as far as possible. He knew he had only one shot.

The child, still trying to stand, was now directly in the path of the plow.

Stretching as far as he could, Mohr put his right leg out in front of him. “Come on, please,” he muttered through clenched teeth, “just give me another inch or two…”

Suddenly the little girl was upon him. Swinging his leg out, he swept her aside with his foot. He saw the baby hit some rocks headfirst, then spin around as the train lumbered by. Had she been knocked clear of the engine?

Mohr leapt from the moving train and ran back to the child. She lay crying by the tracks, blood streaming from a gash beneath her hair.

***

Marshall stood in the front yard of her home, clutching her son’s hand and staring ahead as people ran toward the tracks. She was trying to scream for help, but could only gasp unintelligibly.

***

Mohr knelt down beside the child. “Mama! Mama!” the little girl cried out. Ecstatic relief swept over Mohr.

Cradling her head, Mohr lifted her from the dirt. “Okay, sweetheart,” he whispered. “Let’s go find Mommy.”

It was only then that Mohr noticed the train had stopped and there were flashing red lights of emergency vehicles alongside the tracks. A neighbor, seeing the accident unfold, had dialed 911.

With the baby in his arms, Mohr began to walk and was met by police and a growing crowd of onlookers. Firefighters arrived, took the baby and handed her off to paramedics for a trip to the hospital.

***

Tila Marshall looked up to see police officers approaching her front lawn. Her mind spun in renewed terror. “Don’t you dare tell me that was my baby!” she screamed.

A police detective held up his hand. “Ma’am, ma’am, calm down. The baby’s going to be okay. We just have to find out whose it is.”

Marshall quickly realized that the child’s description fit Emily. The news that her baby was safely en route to the hospital finally sank in, and she collapsed, weeping, into the detective’s arms.

***

Mohr spoke with police and railroad officials, then began feeling shaky himself. Telling himself he still had a job to do, he began to walk the length of the train to check on the cars.

“You go sit in the cab,” a train official said. “I’ll do the inspection.”

As Mohr rested in the train, his pent-up emotions rushed to the surface. It had all unfolded so fast, and the reality of what he had done was only now hitting him.

Within minutes, Lindley was standing beside Mohr, taking the controls again. They looked at each other, their expressions of relief and gratitude more eloquent than words. Mohr’s overalls were still spattered with blood. The train pulled slowly out of Lafayette.

That evening, when Robert Mohr got home, his family was standing on the front porch, applauding. They had listened to the news of his heroism on television. To Mohr’s relief they told him that the little girl had suffered nothing more serious than cuts and bruises. She’d be fine.

***

A week later Mohr stepped from his car in front of Tila Marshall’s house. When Marshall was introduced to the man who had saved her daughter, she hugged him tightly.

Mohr picked up Emily and held her close. “Hello, Emily,” he said.

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The post A Toddler Was Playing on Train Tracks as a Train Approached—The Conductor’s Quick Action Saved Her Life appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Before the incident—before his body became a battleground for competing poisons and his story the subject of zoological curiosity—Jeremy Sutcliffe had actually liked snakes. He’d found them beautiful, even.

Besides, the tattooed 40-year-old wasn’t someone who shied away from wild creatures. He was an avid outdoorsman who took every chance he could to camp and fish. That love of nature had been part of the reason Jeremy and his wife Jennifer, 43, had recently moved to South Texas from Kansas. The place they’d bought on Lake Corpus Christi, a short drive from the Gulf of Mexico, was their dream home. Or that’s what it was going to be. At the moment, they were living in a trailer on their one-acre lot, and the house was still a fixer-upper. A “total gut job,” Jeremy called it, with the pride of someone who plans on doing the gutting himself.

On a steamy Sunday morning in May 2018, the couple was tidying their yard in preparation for an evening cookout with their daughter and her two young children. At around 10:30 a.m., Jeremy began mowing the lawn while Jennifer worked on the garden. She had just reached down to grab a weed when she saw it: a western diamondback rattlesnake, right next to her hand.

Jennifer leaped up as the snake, a meter long, rose into a striking position, with its dusty triangular head tensed and its tail rattling. “Snake!” yelled Jennifer as she backed away. “Snake!”

When he heard his wife’s cry, Jeremy figured she’d run into one of the harmless rat snakes that often showed up on the property. He grabbed a shovel to shoo the creature away and jogged around the house to the garden. That’s when he heard the rattling. His wife was cornered between some shrubbery and the wall of the house, the snake directly in her path.

He first tried to scoop up the rattler using the shovel, without success. Then he did what was necessary: He raised the garden tool and brought the edge down hard through the snake’s body just below the head, decapitating it.

Jennifer went into the house, her heart hammering, while Jeremy headed back to the garden. About ten minutes later, when Jennifer said she was going to let their two small dogs out, he decided to move the dead reptile. He looked at the creature lying limp on the ground. Its head, attached to a stub of body, rested on a paving stone.

He bent down to pick up a stick lying next to the snake’s head so that he could flick it away. But before his hand even touched the ground, the snake attacked—a blur of motion as the creature launched itself forward. Burying its fangs into Jeremy’s right hand down to the bone, the snake injected venom that immediately made his hand feel like it had been smashed by a massive weight. “It bit me!” he yelled in horror.

For Jeremy, it was like something out of a zombie movie—an undead creature’s final act of revenge: But the truth is, bites from decapitated snakes aren’t uncommon. It’s like a chicken with its head cut off, only with a much longer survival time because it’s a cold-blooded reptile with a slow metabolism.

In that moment, however, all Jeremy was thinking about was that the snake that he’d killed was now trying to kill him. The creature’s jaws were clamped around his hand. Desperate to free himself, Jeremy inserted the fingers of his left hand beneath the snake’s upper jaw and tried to pry the fangs free. He managed to remove one of the fangs from his middle finger, but as he tried to pull the head loose, the viper’s jaw clenched again, burying the fang in his ring finger this time.

At the sound of his cry, Jennifer, a trained nurse, had come running. When she saw her husband struggling with the rattlesnake’s head, one thought flashed through her mind: he needed medical attention, now. She ran back into the trailer to get the car keys while Jeremy continued to yank at the snake’s head until finally the fangs came loose and he could fling the viper away.

Jennifer told her husband to get in the car. She wheeled out onto the broiling Texas asphalt, already on the phone with 911 dispatchers. They were a half-hour away from the nearest hospital and she had no idea which of the medical centers in the area held anti-venom. All she knew was that they didn’t have much time.

***

Jennifer Sutcliffe had always been quick to act under pressure. In Texas, she was a nurse consultant, but back when she’d worked in hospitals she’d always been the go-to person for CPR—someone colleagues would turn to when competence and quick thinking could be the difference between life and death.

She’s known her husband for their entire adult lives. They’d met in the summer of 1993, when they were both students working at a nursing home. She’d liked his sparkling blue eyes and the fact that he was kind. The two became friends, then more.

They were married a couple of years later and went on to have a son and a daughter. Jeremy was handy, a builder and a tinkerer who worked installing heating and air conditioning. He always seemed to be helping out one neighbor or another.

In 2011, at the age of 34, he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare and mysterious condition that causes the immune system to attack healthy nerve cells. The disease left Jeremy weak and exhausted, unable to work more than a few hours a day, but the couple got through it together. When they bought the house in Corpus Christi, it felt like the ideal situation. While she worked, he would slowly create their dream home.

Now, as Jennifer sped down the highway, she could feel that fantasy slipping away. On the phone, the 911 dispatcher was directing her down the highway to a spot where an ambulance would meet them to bring her husband to the nearest hospital. Mere minutes after being bitten, however, Jeremy was already feeling the effects of the venom coursing through his body. When he blinked, he saw nothing but blackness. “I can’t see,” he said, panic in his voice, before passing out. Jennifer shook her husband with one hand while keeping the other on the wheel. Jeremy woke up, only to pass out again. Then he began having a seizure. The 911 operator told Jennifer to pull over and wait in front of a church for the paramedics.

Finally, after the longest 15 minutes of her life—during which Jeremy alternated between babbling incoherently and losing consciousness—the paramedics arrived. They transferred Jeremy to the ambulance and sped down the highway, with Jennifer speeding behind. After just ten minutes, however, the ambulance pulled over into the parking lot of an abandoned building. When Jennifer pulled up next to them, they told her that her husband was in bad shape. His blood pressure had plummeted, and they were worried he wasn’t going to make it to the hospital.

“We have to get the HALO,” one of the paramedics said. Instead of driving to the hospital half an hour away, they were sending for a helicopter that would get him into a different emergency room in ten minutes. Moments later, the chopper touched down and whisked Jeremy away.

***

Rattlesnake venom is a miracle of evolution—a complex cocktail of enzymes and proteins that, when injected into a victim’s bloodstream, acts like a powerful blood thinner, destroying skin tissue and blood cells and causing internal hemorrhaging. A rattlesnake’s fangs are connected to venom glands at the back of its head. Snakes can control how much venom they inject, and because producing venom takes energy, they typically don’t want to waste it. When cornered, an adult rattlesnake will usually deliver a light defensive strike to scare off a threat.

A snake that has been decapitated, however, has nothing to lose, so the snake that bit Jeremy emptied its venom glands into his hand. When Jennifer got to the emergency department at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi–Shoreline, about an hour and 15 minutes after her husband, she found a hectic scene. There were six or seven doctors working on her husband, desperately trying to get his blood pressure up. Just two hours after being bitten, Jeremy’s right hand was enormous and swollen, an angry red creeping up his forearm.

She watched with her nurse’s eyes as doctors gave him a host of treatments—cryoprecipitate and vitamin K to clot the blood, and dose after dose of anti-venom. The average snakebite victim is given two to four doses of anti-venom. In total, Jeremy received 26.

Jennifer knew IVs: if a patient needed fluid quickly, you simply increased the flow, turning a drip into a steady trickle. But the doctors here had put the IV bag into an inflatable sleeve that they’d pumped up like a blood-pressure cuff, literally squeezing fluid into her husband’s body as fast as they could. She’d never seen anything like it before. The sight terrified her.

At 5 p.m., after five hours of working on Jeremy, the doctors came to a decision. Sutcliffe’s organs were failing—they needed to induce a coma and put him on a ventilator. Jennifer numbly agreed.

At around 3 a.m., one of the doctors approached her. Her husband wasn’t doing well. His blood pressure was still dangerously low. The mean arterial pressure (or MAP) that doctors were looking for was 65—anything lower and the heart can’t push blood through the body. They had Jeremy on the maximum dosage of four medications designed to increase his blood pressure, but his MAP refused to budge above 60. “We’re at the point where there’s nothing else we can do,” the doctor said. There was a good chance Sutcliffe wouldn’t make it through the night.

Jennifer felt her heart plummet. She somehow hadn’t registered the gravity of the situation. She went to her husband’s bedside and grabbed his hand. “You find that venom and you push it out of your body,” she ordered. “You can’t die.”

Over the next half-hour, she stood by her husband’s side in the ICU, her eyes glued to the monitor next to his bed. Slowly, miraculously, she watched as Jeremy’s blood pressure ticked up. It made it to 65, then 70. The doctors began taking him off the medications, and his pressure remained stable. By sunrise the following day, the worst was over.

***

On May 31, five days after the rattlesnake he killed nearly killed him, Jeremy emerged from his coma and found himself in a strange hospital room. His mind was foggy. His entire body was swollen with more than 20 kilograms worth of water weight. Pain radiated from his legs, his arms, his bowels, everywhere. But as he looked around, he saw that he was surrounded by family: his daughter and her children, his son, Jennifer.

The next weeks were difficult. The mixture of venom and anti-venom had caused severe kidney damage, and Jeremy needed dialysis. The toxins had left him with gallstones, kidney stones, and fierce abdominal pain. He was so weak he couldn’t stand. The medical expenses piled up—close to $60,000—so the couple started a GoFundMe account to pay for the battery of treatments. The fingers of Jeremy’s right hand were badly wounded; the doctors tried skin grafts but were unsuccessful. In the end, they were forced to amputate his ring and middle fingers.

For anyone else, the loss of two fingers would be devastating. But Jeremy didn’t see it that way. After getting a glimpse of the worst, he was feeling positive. About a month after the bite, his kidneys were working well enough for doctors to take him off dialysis. “I’d trade a couple of fingers for my kidneys coming back,” he said.

Lying in a hospital bed, slowly recovering, he’d had time to think. “When I first came to and things were all right, I’d cry a lot and think about all the dumb things I’d done, the people I’ve hurt,” Jeremy says. He remembered skipping his kids’ events or ignoring Jennifer while he was off working on a neighbor’s house. It wasn’t that he’d done anything so terrible—just that his new perspective suddenly made every misstep seem like a tragic waste. The experience had changed him. “The things that used to matter don’t feel like they matter as much,” he says. “My wife and my family seem so much more important now.”

In late June, he was released from the hospital and the couple moved back to their dream-home-in-progress. And one evening in July, they finally had the cookout they’d been planning. Their daughter and grandchildren came over, as did a neighbor. Everyone sat out in the garden, eating hamburgers, grilled corn, and potatoes and enjoying the warm Texas air. The Sutcliffes paused to take it all in. This was their paradise, and no snake could change that.

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The post This Man Beheaded a Snake—And It Still Bit Him appeared first on Reader's Digest.

When Mike Mushaw swabbed his cheek to join the national bone marrow registry nearly three years ago, he never really gave it a second thought. After all, he did it only because his college football coach had encouraged him and his teammates to register.

“The odds are you’re just going to sign up and probably be in it for the rest of your life,” Mushaw, a student at Central Connecticut State University, told NBC. “You probably won’t get 
a call.”

About six months after the sign‑up, he did get a call. The now 21-year-old linebacker’s bone marrow matched a patient in Virginia. Mushaw had to decide whether to go all in. It would mean spending a night in the hospital and under­going general anesthesia, which carries some risk. And he’d likely never know whether his donation worked.

“Right away I said yes,” Mushaw told WTNH. “Once they took 17 vials of blood, I was like, ‘All right, this is real. This is going to happen.’”

Mushaw didn’t know it at the time, but his donation would go to a five-month-old girl named Eleanor who was sick with a rare immuno­deficiency disease that was diagnosed when she was only three months old. Eleanor had rarely left her house other than to travel to the hospital or the doctor. Her immune system was far too weak to risk even the most casual human contact. As the days and weeks passed, her condition had become only more dire.

“Eleanor was going to die without a bone marrow transplant,” her mother, Jessica, told NBC. “The options were to either get a transplant or face fatality in toddlerhood.” (The family has chosen to withhold its surname to maintain privacy.)

Still, there was no guarantee of success. Eleanor’s family had hoped that she would have some improvement from the ­transplant, enough to live a more normal life. Instead, after a few weeks, the doctors at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, came back with shocking news: Eleanor’s condition hadn’t just improved—­Mushaw’s bone marrow had cured her.

“She’s doing amazing,” Mushaw says. “Better than they ever expected her to be. It was a little surprising just because of how serious her condition was, but it was more of a relief and happy feeling than anything.”

Mushaw didn’t know any of this ­until months after his donation. In most cases, the donor and recipient remain anonymous to each other. But about six months after the procedure, ­Eleanor’s parents sent him an e-mail to thank him for saving her life.

“When they told me it was a little girl, I got a little choked up,” Mushaw says. “Just to hear that someone so young has the odds stacked against her and her only hope is in your bone marrow is a heavy feeling.”

But their surprising connection was only beginning. Mushaw asked whether he and Eleanor could ­FaceTime regularly so he could check on her progress. “It was amazing to watch her and be a part of her life,” he says. “It felt amazing and surreal to see it all, just knowing her situation. Now she’s a perfect, normal little two-year-old.”

Eleanor kept tabs on him, too, by watching his football games on TV. In August, about a year after Eleanor’s life-changing transplant, Mushaw invited her family to drive from Virginia to Connecticut to meet at one of his games. From the stands one weekend in November, little Eleanor stood dressed in a royal blue jersey with Mushaw’s number printed on the back. On the front of her jersey was “Be the Match,” the name of the organization that facilitated the donation.

Mushaw himself, by then a senior, was wearing his own special symbol that day: a pair of cleats with Eleanor’s name printed on them.

Tiny shouts of “Mike! Mike!” could be heard from the stands as the little girl cheered on her very own hero: a six-foot-two, 225-pound linebacker with a very generous heart. She ran around and jumped for joy with her parents, pointing at the field as she watched Mushaw play.

“They sent me a picture during the game when she was watching and pointing to me,” Mushaw says. “After­ward, when I saw my phone, I just couldn’t stop smiling at the picture. I set it as my background.”

He wasn’t the only one smiling. 
“I had waited by that point well over a year to finally give a hug to this guy who saved my daughter’s life,” Jessica says. “We felt like we were on cloud nine all weekend getting to spend time with him and have him be with Eleanor. I don’t think I’ve ever smiled that much.”

In January, Mushaw reunited with Eleanor, this time in Virginia, to celebrate her birthday. It will likely be the first of many celebrations together. “As a parent, it feels really great to watch someone love your kid as much as you do,” Jessica says. “We were two complete strangers, and now we’ve become such a big part of each other’s lives.”

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The post A Football Player Decided to Donate Bone Marrow—He Never Imagined That It Would Save a Little Girl’s Life appeared first on Reader's Digest.

He says the problem with teachers is

What’s a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life
was to become a teacher?

He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about teachers:

Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

I decide to bite my tongue instead of his and resist the temptation to remind the dinner guests that it’s also true what they say about lawyers. Because we’re eating, after all, and this is polite conversation.

I mean, you’re a teacher, Taylor.
Be honest. What do you make?

And I wish he hadn’t done that—asked me to be honest—because, you see, I have this policy about honesty and ass kicking: If you ask for it, then I have to let you have it.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could.

I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional Medal of Honor and an A- feel like a slap in the face.

How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.

I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall in absolute silence.

No, you may not work in groups.

No, you may not ask a question.

Why won’t I let you go to the bathroom?

Because you’re bored.

And you don’t really have to go to the bathroom, do you?

I make parents tremble in fear when I call home:

Hi. This is Mr. Mali. I hope I haven’t called at a bad time;
I just wanted to talk to you about something your son said today.
To the biggest bully in the grade, he said,
“Leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes; don’t you?
It’s no big deal.”
And that was the noblest act of courage I have ever seen.

I make parents see their children for who they are and what they can be.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids wonder.

I make them question.

I make them criticize.

I make them apologize and mean it.

I make them write.

I make them read, read, read.

I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful over and over and over again until they will never misspell either one of those words again.

I make them show all their work in math and hide it on their final drafts in English.

I make them understand that if you’ve got this (a brain), then you follow this (a heart), and if someone ever tries to judge you by what you make, you give them this (the finger)

Here, let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true:

Teachers make a difference. Now what about you?

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The bomb shelter in the White House

You’d think the White House would have lots of secret spaces, but there’s only one you’re allowed to know about without security clearance, and even that’s not exactly public knowledge. We’re talking about the bomb shelter President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had constructed in the East Wing in December 1941. While he was having it built, “mum” was the word; he acknowledged only that the East Wing construction was under construction. The bomb shelter isn’t the only thing your history teacher never taught you about the White House.

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Growing up in St. Peters­burg, Florida, my dad had a paper route on his bicycle and then his scooter—­perhaps discovering then his love of two wheels. I picture him as a teenager on his Vespa, sky blue with bloody clouds of rust, crackling and smoking across the bridges of Pinellas County. The evening papers, hot from the press, are rolled like warm loaves in his leather satchel. His taillight is a red ruby in the falling darkness.

Fifty-six years later, in the fall of 2017, I left my home in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Blitzen, my 1989 Harley-Davidson Sportster—a bike my dad and I had built together—bound for New Orleans. My route would take me down the old coastal highway, U.S. 17, stopping overnight at my parents’ house south of Savannah, where I grew up, before heading across the Gulf Coast to New Orleans. My longest solo ride yet.

I wasn’t even out of town before the bike gave me trouble, a slight misfire. I called my old man. We usually spoke a few times a week. I’d been riding on the back of his Harley since I was in grade school. When I was in my teens, we’d hunted the back roads of South Georgia for places to ride our dirt bikes. Now, with me in my thirties, we were becoming closer friends than we’d ever been. We’d worked side by side on Blitzen with hardly a tiff—no small feat when wrenching on a 30-year-old motor­cycle. What’s more, we’d begun to share a love of riding like never before. I still remember the knowing light in his eyes when I described the feeling of my first long solo ride.

I’ll never forget the first time he let me ride his prized 90th Anniversary Harley-Davidson Wide Glide. I was 16, and we were on country roads south of the Florida line. When we stopped for gas, I pulled up next to him, overly excited, and my foot slipped in a patch of gravel. Almost in slow motion, I dropped the bike, 600 pounds of Milwaukee iron. I could see the pain and frustration in his face. But instead of lashing out, he gritted his teeth and brought his emotions to heel, even as he thumbed the new dents and scratches in his once-­perfect machine.

“Happens to the best of us,” he told me. True, everyone who rides a motor­cycle will drop one sooner or later. Still, how easy to forget in the heat of the moment. Rick Brown—my dad—didn’t. I believe that’s one of the great lessons I learned from him: that character often requires us to place what is right over what is easy.

Back in Wilmington, after a few minutes on the phone, we decided that Blitzen’s misfire was only a fleck of rust or debris that made it through the fuel filter—the engine was throbbing low and steady now, like a mechanical heart.

I hit the road.

On rides like these, I always avoid the interstates, just as he taught me. There’s so much more to see on the back roads and byways. The roadside produce stands and junk shops, the Pentecostal churches and mom-and-pop restaurants and gas stations that serve coffee in tiny Styrofoam cups—the best coffee in the world when you’re just off your motorcycle, rain-soaked and shivering.

For me, there’s nothing as therapeutic as a long ride on the back roads. It feels like the wind gradually blows away the nests of doubt and anxiety that gather inside us. I think on motor­cycles we are uniquely vulnerable. We are, perhaps, closer to death, and that puts the lesser worries of everyday life back in their place.

After spending the night in Charleston, I took off early the next morning, riding south over the green-brown marshes and blackwater rivers, bound for Georgia. My old man met me in downtown Savannah. We ate lunch and went to a bookstore and sat at one of the hotel bars high over the water, watching the river traffic chug past. It was an unexpectedly special day. A gift.

The next night, we sat side by side at the kitchen counter while we planned the next legs of my trip. I made note cards as he traced his fingers across the worn atlases he’d used time and again. I was taking many of the same roads he’d ridden in times past, following his path across the Gulf Coast.

There are sons who want to be like their fathers and sons who don’t. I’ve never doubted which I am.

When I slung my leg over Blitzen the next morning, our note cards were safe in my front pocket, in a plastic sandwich bag to protect them from the elements. It was October 16, two days before my 35th birthday. In a photo taken that morning, I’m wearing my second­hand black leather jacket and my red backpack, and my dad’s old weatherproof duffel is tied over the back of my saddle.

The weather was foggy. I rode over the bridges and causeways of the Georgia coast, where the water looked pale beneath the mist, almost white, winding through the darkened cordgrass of the falltime marsh. I rode down Highway 17 through a string of small towns, skirting the Okefenokee Swamp and the Osceola National Forest, making my way to the Panhandle.

I still have the note cards that tell me the towns—Folkston, Macclenny, Sanderson, Lake City, Branford—along with the trip checklist my father gave me, listing such necessities as “Tire patch kit/pump” and “Duct/electrical tape” and “Cigars/lighter/cutter.”

Around lunchtime, I stopped in Mayo, Florida, where I took photos of the Udder Delight ice cream shop. I texted with my old man. He’d ridden to a diner called Steffens near the Georgia-Florida border for lunch and sent me a photo of a die-cast 1940 Ford coupe sitting on a shelf there—a model like the bootlegging car from my novel Gods of Howl Mountain, which we’d “researched” together at vintage car shows and moonshine festivals.

He told me he’d checked the weather and the heavier rain was staying north of my route. He said Wakulla County, Florida—my night’s ­destination—was partly cloudy and 88 degrees. I didn’t reply. I was already back on the road.

When I got the call from my mom, I was at the lodge in Wakulla Springs, south of Tallahassee. I’d just arrived. I knew from the sound of her voice that something had happened, though details were scarce. There had been an accident. A concrete truck had pulled out in front of my dad on his way home from lunch, on Highway 17 just north of the Florida line—the same highway I’d ridden that morning.

I was at the local airport, about to rent a car for the drive home, when Mom called to tell me he was gone. I found myself standing in the parking lot, staring up at the sky. It was sunset, and the sky was almost the color of fire. I thought how many times Dad had ridden south to watch this same sky turn to flame.

I started out early the next morning in the rental car, leaving Blitzen under a cover in the parking lot. My sister took the red-eye from San Francisco, and I picked her up at the airport on my way home. When we got there, Mom had a big manila envelope labeled with a single word: IF. Inside were letters addressed to each of us. Here is a little of mine:

Taylor,
If you are reading this, something has happened to me. I assume it was sudden and I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye and for that I am truly sorry …
I know this is a difficult time but remember the good times we share—Sun & Fun, Sturgis, dirt bikes, Moonshiners’ Festival, Blitzen, Austin, and on and on. I have truly enjoyed all the time we spent together throughout your life (other than a couple of times playing golf :) )…
What I want to stress in this letter is how much I love you and how proud that I am and always will be…

I don’t need to tell you that it takes a special kind of man to write letters like that. Though he shied away from speaking of it, his relationship with his own father had been fraught with difficulty and pain. How easy it would have been for him to follow that same pattern with his own children. Instead, he went against the grain.

A week after the accident, one of my closest childhood friends drove me back to Wakulla Springs. I needed to finish the ride.
I left early the next morning for New Orleans. I stopped at a gas station and realized my chain was loose. I was sitting in the parking lot trying to break the axle bolt free with an ancient crescent wrench when a man appeared. I followed him to his rusted-out Ford, and he produced a fancy Snap-on ratchet set. He went inside for breakfast, where there weren’t even any windows to make sure I didn’t run off with his tools, and told me to come find him when I was done. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me.

The next day, I made it to my aunt’s in New Orleans, where my dad always stopped on his long rides, and Blitzen broke down right in her driveway, as if the machine knew just how much it meant to me to finish the ride for him.

He may have left the world too early for us, but I take some comfort in knowing he would have wanted to go too soon rather than too late. Rick Brown would have wanted to die with his boots on, and he did. He died doing what he loved, and that is rare indeed.

These days, I’m more vigilant than ever on the bike. But there’s no place I feel closer to my dad. I think of him every time I throw my leg over the saddle. I think how much I learned from him, how lucky I am to be his son.

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The post The Two Most Important Things My Dad Passed Down to Me: My Love of Bikes and a Strong Character appeared first on Reader's Digest.

On April 13, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced that our state was launching a warmline. Unlike the health hotline that relates to questions about the virus itself, the warmline is all about connection. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, where I’m the manager of the Office of Recovery-Oriented Systems of Care, organized it. On our first evening alone, we received 250 calls.

Our phones ring a lot

In the month that followed, the warmline has taken more than 3,100 calls. The line is staffed by Certified Peer Support Specialists, all who have a mental health history and have received treatment. All are trained and certified by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. The diversity of our team is extensive and includes people with experience of post-traumatic stress, military sexual trauma, human trafficking, LGBTQ, anxiety, depression, voice-hearers, dissociative issues, domestic violence, child sexual trauma, and more. We’re a diverse mix of races and genders and we work from home in both rural and urban areas. Find out how a therapist is staying sane during the coronavirus pandemic.

Most people just need someone to listen

We break down calls by the level of severity. Prior to the warmline being available, many of our callers may have dialed 911 or the state coronavirus hotline. In under-served, rural areas, we aim to help struggling individuals who may have otherwise turned to first responders—leaving the police, firefighters, and EMS workers to attend to current medical emergencies.

But other calls are more serious

About 82 percent of the calls we take are “Level 1,” or people who need someone to listen and provide support. About 17 percent are “Level 2,” those who want to talk and are in need of specific resources. That leaves 1 percent, which are “Level 3” crisis calls, related to suicide, abuse, serious mental health concerns, or substance use. Those who call us are struggling with fear of getting the virus and/or loneliness and isolation or would like a referral to other agencies like food banks, unemployment, and telemedicine. For the majority, we offer supportive listening while discussing wellness and coping skill strategies. Learn 16 unavoidable facts about domestic violence.

Many who call us have little support at home

A lack of social connectedness is a common thread. Understandably, if you’re spending a lot of time alone and aren’t talking to others about your feelings as much as you used to, you might experience more anxiety, fear, and severe isolation. The frequent callers are individuals with little or no support, who are confined at home or are unable to receive face-to-face services they have had in the past.

We helped one woman keep her pet…

One caller shared that she felt totally alone with her grief of possibly having to give up her pet because she could not afford to feed it. We listened to and validated her feelings of sadness, then shared resources to pet pantries. She may be able to keep her pet now—all because of someone answering her call on the warmline. Here’s how you can foster a pet during the pandemic—even as animal shelters are clearing out.

…and another caller talk through challenges related to addiction

“I just need someone to talk to about anything,” one caller said. We got into a conversation about sports and the weather, and then he started crying and admitted that he’s really struggling with his addictions while being isolated because of COVID-19. He knows all of his coping skills, yet is having a hard time putting them into practice. The thoughts are coming on stronger, he said, but he was not suicidal. He was just nervous he would “fail” again. So we directed him to a peer who could share their personal journey with addictions and how they overcame them—but that it’s still a daily struggle. After the peer told the caller, “It’s okay to fail because we learn and grow from it,” he stopped crying and said he felt a lot better.

Seniors who live alone are really struggling right now

An 87-year-old woman who lives alone reached out to the warmline. She shared that she lives with schizophrenia, and mentioned that she had gotten a call from the agency that she receives services from telling her that the staff member she has worked with had passed away. We listened to her grief of losing the person that was most helpful to her. Loss and loneliness are such a heartbreaking duo.

The connections formed on the warmline are quite remarkable

We received a call from a young man who wanted to make sure the warmline was “real.” He explained that he lives with anxiety and depression, and is an essential worker and “working a million hours.” He shared that he was really grateful to know this warmline was available to him and plans to call again when he is feeling overwhelmed. Before hanging up, another caller said that he felt so much better as a result, and would call back tomorrow to check in. Those connections are priceless. In other heartwarming news, check out 21 moving photos of kindness in the time of coronavirus.

For more info on everything to do with the virus, see our comprehensive guide.

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The post What It’s Like to Work at a State Health Helpline During Coronavirus appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Motivational quote #1

“Find the joy. When you feel it, let it wash over you… take a moment to appreciate it. Be grateful for the people in your life, for waking up feeling good and pain free, and for the stretch of road ahead that’s so full of possibilities. When you encounter bumps, keep going and don’t look back.”
—Katie Couric

The post 30 Motivational Quotes from Eternal Optimists appeared first on Reader's Digest.

When it comes to kindness, compassion, and caring for others, nurses have us all beat. They work long shifts doing many of the tiny, important tasks that keep us healthy, everything from school nurses who fix booboos with Band-Aids and send kids back to the playground, to nurses in hospitals who perform complicated, life-saving maneuvers on the sickest patients every day. During the coronavirus crisis, nurses are the first line of defense in clinics against the ravages of COVID-19. Many even exceed the already arduous call of duty. These are some of their stories. If you know a story of kindness that you’d like to share, go to rd.com/nicest.

The post 14 Heartwarming Stories of Nurses Who Went Above and Beyond Their Call of Duty appeared first on Reader's Digest.

I live in New York City, and my first “official” cat rescue was 18 years ago. Sylvester (the cat) was dipped in some kind of commercial adhesive and glued to Amsterdam Ave at 190th street. He was in the street next to a can of food. I took off one of my shirts, wrapped him up, and brought him home and have been rescuing cats non-stop ever since.

I started rescuing animals in grade school

I brought everything home when I was a kid. Back then, I lived in Englewood, New Jersey. My parents weren’t thrilled with it, but I brought home all kinds of critters—including cats. I would ask my mother to buy tuna. Little did she know I was showing the neighborhood cats how to get into my basement and feeding them tuna. One day my mother went to the pantry to get some tuna to make a sandwich, only to find no tuna—busted! But most of the cats I rescued lived with us, or we found homes for them. Don’t miss these heartwarming stories of homeless animals who saved their owners.

I turned a basement into a cat sanctuary

Before I created Denise’s Washington Heights Sanctuary a year ago, I rescued roughly 50 cats a year and took them back to my apartment. Some cats were adopted; some were found to have microchips from other rescue groups and returned to them. I also kept some. My landlord gave me the space in the basement to create a kitty sanctuary. But it was in horrible shape—inches of dirt on the floor from years of flooding and boarded-up windows that needed replacing. It took a few months and thousands of dollars to clean and paint it, but now it’s a safe home for the cats I rescue. Since creating the cat sanctuary, I’ve rescued more than 100 cats. Currently, I have approximately 38 cats. Half are in the sanctuary and half are in my apartment.

My army of volunteers

Although I do all day-to-day care and most of the rescues, it’s basically a full-time job—in addition to my dog-walking gig. I have a small army of online minions that share my posts and get the word out. They respond to people giving away pet goods, food, litter, and toys, and throw my name in the hat. I have a couple of people that will transport animals, pick up goods, etc. too, and people who regularly check in to make sure everything is okay and if I need anything. If I have a large or difficult rescue and need a second set of hands, friends jump right in—no matter what the weather is like outside. If you’re an animal lover, you’ll want to know about the things shelters desperately need right now.

It’s not cheap

I’m lucky to get some donations for food and litter, and neutering and spaying and shots are free through the ASPCA. However, the Snap test, which tests for FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus) and FeLV (feline leukemia virus), is $45 per cat. (Cats who test positive for those are sent to special sanctuaries equipped to care for them.) But I pay all vet costs for injuries or illness, plus de-worming and monthly Revolution, which protects cats from fleas. By the way, here are more options to get rid of cat fleas.

It’s frustrating when my efforts are hindered

I live in upper Manhattan, where there are approximately 500 acres of wooded parkland, and hundreds of cats are dumped in these parks every year. What makes it extremely frustrating to rescue these cats is that there is a New York Restoration Project, and the New York City Parks Department won’t communicate with us when they remove the invasive plant species in these parks. When the invasive plants are removed, the natural burrow the cats live in is often plugged up or destroyed. Yet, when these burrows are left alone, we can trap a mama cat and her babies, making our work easier.

This is what I do when I find a cat

Since there are so many cats in need and so few rescuers, it is essential to work with integrity. No one is a “professional.” No one is perfect. We all make mistakes when it comes to rescuing cats. Always walk softly on someone else’s turf. First, I record/document where I found the cat and their living conditions. Each police precinct in New York City has a chip reader to scan for microchips with the pet’s information. If yours doesn’t, I recommend taking the cat to your local shelter, which will scan for a microchip. They may also be aware of the missing cat from an owner who reported them missing.

Next, I start posting, asking for help. NEVER post your location—it’s like bait for animal abusers who come out of the woodwork, like people who answer ads only to use the dog in dog fights or people who poison animals. If possible, bring the cat home and put them in a spare room or bathroom. If they are injured, get them to a veterinary hospital. If you don’t have cat supplies on hand, just use a box or a disposable baking tin as a litter box, with some shredded newspaper for the litter. I typically use old towels for bedding because they’re easy to wash. And if you don’t have cat food on hand, tuna, boiled shredded chicken, or even baby food work for cat food. Here’s what vets say you should feed your little lion.

Some cats are easier to rescue than others

In New York City, I don’t think we have true feral cats; they are mostly dumped house cats. As far as I know, “ferals” don’t come near people and don’t make eye contact. I do think people are quick to label a cat “feral” and think it’s not adoptable. I have several “ferals” in my apartment. One is Peanut. I brought him into my apartment, and he hates me. One day he got out of my third-floor apartment when a repairman accidentally let him out. Long story short, he made his way back to a feeding station and the trap I put out. The relief on his face was evident when he saw me. It’s as if he was saying, “It’s about time!” He’s home now with his crew, and yes, he still hates me. On the flip side, there’s Frenchie, a “feral” baby maker from the park. She headbutt-demands attention and dinner. She’ll never be adopted because she bonded with me, and that’s that! This is the difference between a feral cat and a stray cat.

Rescuing older kittens

The ASPCA helped me once with some kittens, but that was a rare occasion, as they are extremely overwhelmed. Most rescue groups don’t have the manpower to do the actual rescue. Every situation is different, depending on the age of the kittens, how friendly they are, and where they are. Once I’ve figured that out, I stalk the cats to try to see how many there are, and then I plan accordingly. If they’re in a relatively safe place, I feed them a few times and set up a regular feeding schedule. Hopefully, at this time, the cats begin to trust me. Finally, I drop trap, a humane way to capture cats. If mama stands back to let the babies eat first, I grab the kittens and use them as bait to get her. If I come upon a lone kitten, I’ll take it home for its health and safety and come back and search for others later. Don’t miss these happy stories of kittens and puppies that found foster homes during the pandemic.

Caring for newborn kittens requires around-the-clock care

Recently we found Little Broadway all by himself on Broadway (hence the name). We searched for the mama and siblings, but none were found. He was between two to three weeks old and wouldn’t take the bottle, so I used a syringe to get kitten milk replacer (KMR) in him, which he drinks about every four hours. (By the way, never use cow’s milk for kittens!) I immediately tried getting him interested in food by dipping my finger in baby food and rubbing it on his lips every two to three hours. He’s now eating kitten food on his own. Little Broadway is a little confused about the litter and keeps peeing in the big cats’ dry food bowls. Understandably, they are not amused! He’ll get the hang of it.

One last thing about kittens: Try to use the shredded paper litter. The dusty clumping litter can be dangerous when kittens ingest it. Cats have a lot of instinctual behaviors—this is why they know how to use a litter box.

There’s corruption in rescuers

There’s a lot of room for corruption when dealing with egos and unscrupulous “rescuers.” I’ve had rescue groups claim me as one of their rescuers and collect donations meant for my sanctuary that were never forwarded to me. I know this because people have sent me tracking numbers of donations sent to my group, attention to me, with instructions to give to me, never forwarded to me.

It’s so worth it

The best part is when the cats thank me. It may be subtle: a facial expression, a purr, or when they snuggle up next to me. Other times, cats make it more obvious by crawling into your lap or becoming your new shadow. My heart melts when I see them relax in the window, learn what a comfy chair is for, or make biscuits in their new bed. Even when the cats don’t make it, I’m keeping them from dying alone in the street and showing them kindness and love. It tears my heart out, but I hope it is peaceful for them. As rewarding as rescuing cats is, I do get discouraged all the time. When I do, I take a breath and sit in the cat sanctuary. I watch these cats that are fat and happy and watch the videos of my adopted cats and how loved they are now with their new families. Knowing they came from the street and now have a loving home is the greatest feeling in the world and makes it all worth it. You’ll purr over these before-and-after cat adoption photos of cats that found forever homes.

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The post I Rescue 100 Cats a Year—Here’s What I Want You to Know appeared first on Reader's Digest.

The signs appeared practically overnight. They’d been staked anywhere and everywhere—in front of homes, along sidewalks, around the local high school. Each featured just a few uplifting words in simple black type: “Don’t Give Up,” “You Are Worthy of Love,” “Your Mistakes Do Not Define You.” The high school in Newberg, Oregon, had lost two students and four alumni to suicide that year, so the town of 25,000 instantly understood the messages. For days, what no one could figure out was who had planted them.

Amy Wolff had. At first, she didn’t want anyone to connect her to them. For one thing, the 36-year-old mother of two didn’t really feel it was her place to weigh in. She had done so, in part, because she’d lost her own teenage brother in an accident about 20 years earlier, and she felt compelled to address Newberg’s grief. She planted the signs anonymously because she wanted them to be about their message, not any one person. It was compassion for compassion’s sake. “I couldn’t just do nothing,” says Wolff. “I’m not qualified, but gosh darn it, I can print yard signs.”

Yet as Wolff saw the deep chord her signs struck with her neighbors, she decided to step forward to share her message publicly. Instantly, her inbox was flooded with requests for more signs. She asked a friend, graphic designer Jessica Brittell, to mock up and print another batch. And then another. And another. And another. “We decided to just ride it out and not push it; just keep going until the orders stop,” says Wolff. “That ended up being an inside joke because it never stopped.”

That was in May 2017. Since then, the Don’t Give Up Movement has spread from Newberg to the hearts and yards of people in every state and several countries. The signs have morphed into wristbands, bumper stickers, pins, stamps, and temporary tattoos. Wolff charges only the cost of materials and shipping. “It’s a terrible business decision if we wanted to function like a business,” she says.

One of the most heartening elements of the Don’t Give Up Movement is that it has gone viral in a remarkably human way. People have taken to planting the signs in their lawns, taking selfies, and then posting them to share.

Chrisanne Moger commented on one of the movement’s Instagram posts about the need for one particular sign: “We’re All in This Together.” She thought it would really speak to a world huddling together under the cloud of COVID-19. Wolff agreed, and she received 750 orders within a week of its creation. A mother in Colorado contacted the organization after her stepson’s sudden death to say that her family, unable to travel during the quarantine, couldn’t attend the funeral. “We aren’t able to be together to love, support, and help each other heal,” she wrote. “I saw one of your signs recently and it was a gut-punch message from above to hang on.”

Aware of the added emotional challenges isolation brings, the Don’t Give Up Movement has since offered to send hand­written letters of support to anyone in quarantine who needs it. The group received about 400 requests in just 24 hours. A young woman in New Jersey wrote that she struggles with mental illness and that shelter-in-place rules were especially hard on her and her family; she asked whether the Don’t Give Up group could send her relatives a cheerful note.

One special education teacher in Texas used the campaign to teach a lesson in unity after his classroom moved online. Isaiah Brown created care packages stocked with Don’t Give Up goodies, including wristbands on which he’d written a student’s name alongside his own. He then drove to his students’ homes to drop the packages on their doorsteps. Some of the kids were so excited to get the surprise delivery that they ran outside to see Brown through his car window.

The next time his class gathered online, the students couldn’t stop chattering about how happy the gifts had made them—one student gleefully declared he would never take his wristband off. “It was the best feeling in the world, that I could have an impact outside of school by using these products,” says Brown. “This was a good way to let them know that we care even when we can’t see them.”

Wolff’s message is about to grow yet again. After seeing her signs online, a literary agent called to negotiate a book deal. Signs of Hope: How Small Acts of Love Can Change Your World will be out next spring, after some last-minute revisions. “I rewrote the last chapter in the middle of the outbreak, not knowing how long this will go on for,” Wolff shares. “But there has never been a more drastic backdrop 
to the power of hope and empathetic action than right now.” Next, read these stories of neighbors helping during COVID-19 that will inspire you to do the same.

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The post Her Hometown Was Broken After Multiple People Took Their Lives, so She Set Out to Create Signs of Hope appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Michael Todd wore the same clothes every day for the first three weeks of school. When the other kids began to notice that he was wearing the same black pants and blue, teal, and gray long-sleeve shirt day after day, Todd, a freshman at Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School in Memphis, became the target of taunts and laughter. But there was little Todd could do. His mother simply couldn’t afford to buy him new clothes.

Two of the kids piling on were An­twan Garrett and Kristopher Graham, a pair of freshman football players. But over time, they realized that their disparaging words felt like bully­ing and seemed to be slowly crushing Todd’s spirit. Something finally clicked.

“I felt like I needed to do something,” Graham told CBS News. So he and Garrett hatched a plan. They went home and hunted through their own drawers and closets. The next day at school, they met Todd at their third-period class and asked him to come into the hall. Todd was understandably apprehensive about being called out by the larger boys.

“He wasn’t smiling or anything, and I was like, ‘I think this is going to make you smile,’ ” Graham says. “I told him, ‘We’re in the same third period, and I apologize for laughing at you, and I want to give something to you to make it up.’ ” He then handed Todd a bulky bag. Inside were clean shirts and shorts, plus a brand-new pair of New Balance sneakers.

Todd was blown away. “I was very happy,” he told WATN-TV. “Shocked, completely.”

And Todd got much more than a new wardrobe. He no longer sits alone at lunch. Now he eats with his new friends, Garrett and Graham.

“I’ve been bullied my entire life,” Todd told CBS News. Reflecting on the day Garrett and Graham called him into the hall, he called it “the best day of my entire life, basically.” Next, learn about more real-life heroes that are changing the world.

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After we published “How Is He Still Alive?” about a ten-year-old boy who survived a harrowing head injury caused by a skewer, we received a letter from Donna Barbour. Barbour had her own story to tell, and she assured 
us it was every bit as frightening—and perhaps even more miraculous. She may be right.

It was a warm April evening, and I had gotten home from work about an hour earlier. As I often did after a long day, I went straight to my backyard and did some work in my flower garden before deciding to light the grill to make dinner for my husband and myself. I had only just walked a few steps on the patio when I suddenly felt a horrifying blow to the right side of my neck. It felt as though someone had hit me with a baseball bat. I knew that no one was in the yard with me, so no one could have hit me. Totally confused, I reached up and, to my shock and horror, realized that I had been shot—with an arrow.

I grabbed the arrow with a death grip where it had pierced my neck and ran inside, screaming my husband’s name. Ed was in the back of the house talking to our daughter, Keila, on the phone. He dropped the phone and ran to me. Ed grabbed me by the shoulders to stop me from running and told me to lie down on the couch. Then he went to call 911. I lay there and prayed. I didn’t know if there was any way that I could survive.

The next hour or so was a crazy, jumbled mix of events. The arrow had come from a young man practicing with a compound bow, used for hunting, in his backyard. Luckily, he was using a practice arrow, which is smooth and rounded; a broadhead arrow for hunting would have killed me. He lived across the alley and was shooting to the north. The arrow had ricocheted and turned back to the south. It went over two, possibly three, fences, through the shrubs and an oak tree, between two large hanging baskets, and into my neck as I walked across the patio. A shot from a compound bow can travel up to 200 miles per hour, or 300 feet per second.

We had EMTs who were simply wonderful that evening. As they entered the house and sat down beside me, they were perfectly calm and totally focused. They called for help from the paramedics and for a medical helicopter from Amarillo, Texas, which is about 65 miles away and the closest city with a trauma center.

As the helicopter lifted off to take me to Amarillo, I felt complete peace. I had seen the large number of people outside my house, and I knew that the Lord was being bombarded with prayers on my behalf. I felt certain that everything would be fine.

At the hospital, family and friends were gathering. I tried hard to re­assure them. I kept telling them I was OK, but the looks on their faces told me that they weren’t buying it. It was a difficult job since I had an arrow sticking out of my neck!

Soon they took me back for a CT scan to determine the location of the arrow on the inside. The doctors and nurses began telling me how lucky I was. The arrow had gone between the carotid artery and the jugular vein. That space between the two is a quarter of an inch or less. The diameter of the arrow is larger than the space it went through. It actually pushed the artery to the side—without nicking it. There was no bleeding at all. Although I didn’t realize at the time how truly incredible this was, I began arguing with them that I wasn’t “lucky”; I was “blessed”! This is an argument I have continued to wage ever since.

As I was being taken back to surgery to remove the arrow, my family entered a waiting room full of ­people—in fact, there were two waiting rooms full! Someone told my son, Kyle, that there was a post on the site ­texasbowhunter.com asking for prayers for me. It turns out a friend had called her son, who is a bow hunter, and told him about the accident, and he had posted the prayer request on that website.

The morning after my two-hour surgery, with my family all gathered in my room, a couple of the doctors came by to see me. After they left, the surgeon came in. He checked the wound and talked to us about what he had done. Then he told us something that rocked our world again.

He said that the CT scan had revealed that I had a brain tumor. I remember going a bit numb but thinking, God works in mysterious ways!

The surgeon said they were almost certain the tumor was benign, but it was located in a very difficult place. I was stunned, of course, but I felt like it was God’s plan for me to find it.

A few days later, I went in for a second opinion from another neuro­surgeon. He said that it was a difficult surgery but that it had to be done. The tumor was about to cross the midline of my brain, which would have resulted in a massive stroke.

The brain surgery was successful, and in less than a week I was back home. I was discouraged and feeling horrible. I had lost a lot of blood from a bacterial infection, Clostridium difficile, and was extremely anemic and weak. I was beginning to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress dis­order, hearing the swoosh and then the thunk of the arrow. Thankfully, that didn’t last too long.

All my adventures had taken a toll, and I needed a time of healing and rest. All was uneventful for a couple of years. I continued to tell people that I was not lucky; I was blessed. I had an MRI each year to make sure that the tumor was not growing back. But in 2015, after I had my MRI, the doctor’s office called and told me that I needed to come back in to see them.

The doctor explained that there was still no sign of a tumor, but they had found a brain aneurysm. Normally, aneurysms aren’t discovered until they rupture, and that is almost always too late. Again, I was facing uncertainty and dreading brain surgery. I simply do not know how people go through times like these without the Lord and the peace that comes from knowing God is in control.

In the weeks before the surgery, I felt at peace with whatever the outcome would be. We went to Dallas for the procedure. They found it was a very fragile and difficult aneurysm, covered with blisters and on the verge of rupturing, but the doctor successfully clipped it.

Had it not been for that arrow, I would have died from a brain tumor, a stroke, or an aneurysm! And honestly, the arrow should have killed me. But it didn’t.

For weeks and weeks, everyone gathered around me when I went to the grocery store or the post office. People would stop and hug me and even cry, saying how happy they were that this had happened. It strengthened everyone’s faith.

Coincidences? Luck? I think not. The gentleman who wrote the last comment on the prayer-request thread on texasbowhunter.com summed it up in just two words. He simply wrote, “Amazing grace.”

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The post In a Freak Accident, This Woman Was Shot in the Neck with an Arrow and It Ended Up Saving Her Life appeared first on Reader's Digest.

I fell hard for one of the oldest cons in the book. But this scheme wasn’t cooked up by some fictional Nigerian prince soliciting me through a sketchy e-mail. I fell under the spell of an immensely lovable woman who inserted herself into my life and became my best friend. She was also an international con artist on the run.

She snared me in an age-old con called the Inheritance Scam, ultimately bilking me out of nearly $100,000. She simultaneously destroyed my sense of self and darkened my once joyful outlook. As she was ruining my life, she was also scamming dozens of others around the world by impersonating psychics, mortgage brokers, psychologists, lawyers, and travel agents and even pretending to be a cancer victim.

She was a true queen of the con, using disguises and plastic surgery to alter her appearance. I was a reality TV producer, working on shows such as American Ninja Warrior and Shark Tank, and I never saw through her masterful performances. She might have gotten away with cheating many more people if she hadn’t turned me into a vigilante. I started my own investigation, uncovered other victims, and helped bring her to justice.

Today, she’s in jail, probably wondering how on earth she became the victim of one of her own victims.

Allow me to explain.

She introduced herself to me as Mair Smyth in May 2013, when she joined a group of angry neighbors in my living room to discuss what to do about losing access to our building’s swimming pool because of a legal spat with a neighboring building.

“I can help,” she told us. “My boyfriend is a lawyer who can get the pool back!”

I liked her immediately. We all did. She was brash. Funny. Intelligent and outspoken. Ironically, for someone who turned out to be a liar and a con artist, she came across as a woman who would always “tell it like it is.”

She also came across as extremely wealthy. She wore expensive Jimmy Choo shoes and once showed me her closet filled with more than 250 pairs. I later discovered they were all fake.

After our initial meeting in my apartment that night, Mair invited my husband, Pablito, and me to dinner. Over the next year, she frequently wined and dined us at fancy restaurants and always insisted on picking up the bill. “I have a lot of money—let me pay!” she’d plead convincingly.

We’d hang out almost every evening in our barbecue area, exchanging intimacies under the cool Los Angeles sky. Mair told us she was originally from Ireland. One night she pointed to a framed document hanging in her living room. “This is the Irish Constitution,” she said.

“See that signature at the bottom? That’s my great-uncle’s.” I had no idea that, like her shoes, that tale was fake.

Mair brought me Irish tea and pastries and regaled me with stories of how when she was a young girl, her grandmother, who was supposedly in the Irish Republican Army, would take her to the top of a bridge and teach her how to hurl Molotov cocktails down on British soldiers. I was captivated and horrified.

When I tearfully confided in her that part of my family had disowned me for being gay, she pounced. “My family disowned me, too!” she said as she fought back tears. “They’re trying to get me disinherited.”

Mair told me that an uncle, the patriarch of her family, had recently died, and her cousins were dividing up an estate worth 25 million euros (about $32 million). She said she was supposed to receive 5 million euros as her share of the inheritance and showed me angry text messages and e-mails from her cousins threatening that she wouldn’t get a dime.

Mair told me she had taken a lot of family money with her when she left Ireland many years ago, so she never needed to work. But she claimed she enjoyed working, so she got hired at a travel agency where her family did a lot of business.

Fourteen months into our friendship, Mair and I were like sister and brother, even ending our phone calls with “I love you.” She told me that her barristers (I had to look up the word to learn that it means “lawyers”) were having trouble trying to secure her inheritance and that they had warned her about a clause in her uncle’s will stating that if any family member were convicted of a felony, the person would forfeit his or her share.

“You’d better be careful!” I cautioned her. “One of your disgruntled cousins might try and set you up!” Many of her family members certainly appeared to hate her. Why wouldn’t they set her up? I thought.

On July 8, 2014, my phone rang.

“You have a collect call from an inmate at the Century Regional Detention Facility. Press one to accept,” the computerized voice instructed me.

It was Mair. I quickly pressed one.

“You were right!” she sobbed. “I was arrested today. My family set me up to make it look like I stole $200,000 from my job.”

“I told you this would happen!” I yelled. I was distraught. I found a bail bondsman and paid him $4,200 to get her out of jail. That’s when I first learned that her legal name was Marianne Smyth, not Mair Smyth. But 
she paid me back the next day, when she was released from jail. Or, rather, the married man she was dating at the time paid me back. Little did I (or he) know she was scamming him too.

As the months passed, Mair showed me e-mails from her lawyers assuring her that the case against her was falling apart. I had no idea those e-mails were from fake accounts she had created herself, just like the messages she claimed were from her cousins.

Then, almost three years into our friendship, she told me that the district attorney prosecuting her case had frozen her bank accounts. So I started lending her money. She had immediately paid back the $4,200 I used to bail her out of jail, so I felt confident she’d pay me back any other money I loaned her.

But that’s the thing: The term con artist is short for confidence artist because these individuals are skilled at gaining your confidence and then using it to scam you out of your money.

Over the course of several months, I lent Mair nearly $15,000. You’d think I’d be worried about giving her that much money, but I wasn’t. Not only was she my best friend, but she also claimed she was about to inherit millions of dollars. I never even considered that anything sinister could be taking place.

One day, Mair called me and said the DA was demanding $50,000 to dismiss the case against her. I didn’t have $50,000 in cash. But I did have an 840 credit score. So I let her charge the $50,000 on my credit cards to get the criminal case against her dropped.

A few months later, Mair was arrested again. She said the judge had charged her with money laundering, something to do with her using my credit cards, and punished her with 30 days in jail—a “slap on the wrist.” She assured me, once again, that as soon as she got out and received her inheritance, she would pay me back.

Mair called me collect from jail every day. When I said I wanted to come visit her, she begged me not to. “I don’t want you to see me like this,” she said. But I insisted. So I logged on to the jail’s website to schedule a visit. That’s when the true devastation she had wrought on my life started to reveal itself.

The website showed that Mair was serving time for felony grand theft. This was no slap on the wrist.

I took the day off and rushed to a Los Angeles courthouse. With trembling hands, I reviewed every record I could find from Mair’s case. I discovered she had lied to me about everything. I suddenly couldn’t breathe.

I learned that the $50,000 I let her charge on my credit cards had gone to pay $40,000 as part of a plea agreement to a felony grand theft charge she faced for stealing more than $200,000 from the travel agency she worked for. Had she not been able to come up with that $40,000, she would have received a five-year jail sentence, not the measly 30 days she actually served.

Her bank accounts had never been frozen. There was no wealthy Irish family or inheritance. She’s not even Irish! Those were all lies she used to entrap me.

I went home and collapsed in my husband’s arms. “How could I let this happen to us?” I sobbed.

Eventually, my pain was replaced by breathtaking anger and the determination to do something.

The day Mair was released from jail, I confronted her in the parking lot outside our apartment building. She denied everything. “That’s not true, Johnathan! That’s not true!” she protested as tears streamed down her face.

But I was done believing anything she had to say. I balled up my fists, clenched my jaw, and walked away. We never spoke again.

I went to the police days later, in March 2017, and filed a report. The officer interviewing me seemed skeptical that there was anything they could do. “Don’t give strangers your money” were his parting words. So I started my own investigation.

I dug up Mair Smyth’s high school yearbook and learned that she was born Marianne Andle in Maine and graduated from Bangor High in 1987. She later moved to Tennessee, where, according to estranged family members I spoke with, she claimed she had breast cancer and allegedly scammed friends and neighbors out of thousands for “treatments.” They told me Mair was oddly obsessed with wanting to be Irish. In 2000, she went to Ireland on vacation. She ended up marrying a local and stayed for nine years.

In the same way that wooden stakes kill vampires and silver bullets kill werewolves, publicity kills con artists. I began turning my pain into a profound sense of purpose. I started a blog, johnathanwalton.com, detailing how Mair had scammed me. Soon, other victims of hers from all over the world started reaching out.

I heard from one who claimed Mair had scammed her out of $10,000 by impersonating a psychologist. She allegedly tricked our landlord out of $12,000 in rent by pretending to have cancer. Mair had iron-­deficiency anemia and would purposely avoid iron-rich foods so she could get admitted into hospitals for iron in­fusions. While sitting in a hospital bed, she’d ask a nurse to take her picture and then e-mail that photo to her victims to better sell her cancer story. She used this particular scam a lot.

A police detective in Northern Ireland told me that authorities in Belfast had been looking for Marianne Smyth for years. The detective said she had worked as a mortgage broker in 2008 and had scammed many people and then vanished.

All in all, Mair Smyth used at least 23 different aliases and has been charged with fraud and grand theft in Florida and Tennessee.

I was determined to get justice and called the Los Angeles Police Department every day.

A year after I’d last seen her, Mair was arrested and charged with grand theft for scamming me. She was released on her own recognizance. I never went near her, but one month before trial, Mair filed for a restraining order against me, asserting that I was threatening her with violence. It cost me $1,500 to hire an attorney to fight her bogus claim. “If a judge grants the restraining order, you would be prevented from testifying against her at her criminal trial,” my lawyer explained.

Could this be her checkmate move? I wondered. I was apoplectic.

Thankfully, the judge refused to grant the restraining order, and Mair’s trial proceeded. The prosecution presented a mountain of irrefutable evidence. Though she was charged with scamming only me, the judge allowed testimony from three other victims to demonstrate a pattern.

Mair did not testify in her own defense. As witnesses described how she had scammed them, she just sat there with an emotionless look on her face. That was probably her biggest tell to the jury. She was a brilliant actress while she was conning people, but remarkably, she didn’t know how to act innocent.

The only defense her attorney had was that I was making the whole story up. Supposedly I had persuaded all of the other witnesses—people I didn’t even know before Mair scammed me—to lie under oath. He was terrifyingly convincing.

The prosecutor went over in extreme detail each dollar Mair had scammed from me. Reliving that experience in front of a roomful of strangers ignited fury and embarrassment and regret in a new, painful way.

I spent two years pursuing Marianne Smyth. I had to file for bankruptcy because of what she had done to me. And the 24 court appearances I made even before the trial—for continuances, pretrial motions, and ­hearings—meant I missed a lot of work and lost even more money. Not to mention the cost of hiring private investigators in multiple states and countries to ferret out all her scams.

But it was worth it.

On January 9, 2019, Marianne Smyth was found guilty of conning me out of $91,784—the money she had borrowed plus thousands of dollars of interest that had accrued on my credit cards. She was sentenced to five years behind bars.

Besides me, only two of Mair’s other marks reported her to the police. That enabled her to continue scamming people for years. Most of her victims, like most victims of any con artist, were too ashamed to tell anyone what had happened to them.

I am now suspicious of everyone and everything. Making new friends is not something I’m good at anymore. And I’m ashamed too. But my desire to stop her from hurting other people is much stronger than my shame.

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When Sherrie and Michael Lloyd first got married, they had nine credit cards between them, and they were piling up significant debt. Six years later, this southern California couple has two kids under the age of four and they’re debt-free with a healthy savings to boot. Here’s how the Lloyds managed this remarkable turnaround.

The cause of debt

The Lloyds had accrued some medical bills from Sherrie’s two pregnancies and Michael’s appendicitis. Then, two years ago, the couple decided to buy a house, but they underestimated the cost of homeownership. While they had no problem paying the mortgage and utilities, they hadn’t factored in unforeseen expenses—they needed to pour money into foundation repairs, roof issues, and a leaky shower. While they were able to get the medical bills under control, the home repairs added up fast. If you’re trying to get your debt under control, you may want to break these money saving “rules” that experts don’t believe in.

How they paid it off

After signing up for a six-week class called Financial Peace—they found it through their church; it’s based on the best-selling Dave Ramsey’s Complete Guide to Money—the Lloyds were inspired to take charge. Sherrie says the class taught her to see that “you can’t use your money for the future when it’s tied to the past.”

Using Ramsey’s financial principles, they first saved up $1000 for an emergency fund. Then they consolidated their nine credit cards down to two and employed Ramsey’s “snowball” approach by paying off their smallest debts first (most of their medical bills) before tackling the larger amounts. Their final—and toughest—step was to transfer their remaining debt—$18,000—onto one interest-free card and then give themselves an 18-month deadline to pay it off. It might be more doable than you think—these money saving tricks can help you save $1000 in just one month.

Why this worked for them

The effectiveness of the Lloyds’ financial plan came from their ability to see progress right away. By paying off $1000 in credit card debt per month, Sherrie and Michael could actually see the debt going down. They also tackled their problem as a team. “In a marriage, you’re in it together—both working toward a solution together,” Sherrie says. Since Michael is the tech-savvy one, he created a chart using Microsoft Excel to plot out their budget. They could see their monthly expenses clearly: Mortgage, utilities, phones, cars, plus the accelerated $1000 credit card payment. They also allocated $100 per month into savings to build up their emergency fund, and the remaining balance had to stretch itself out to pay for other expenses like food and gas.

What they sacrificed

To make this happen, they had to give up a few trips. Rather than charge airfare to visit family on the east coast, they decided to save up airline points and go at a later time. It also meant saying no to certain luxuries, like eating out and going to the movies or amusement parks. Instead, they took their kids to free community events. They saved money on the kids’ clothes by getting hand-me-downs from friends. The couple says their sacrifices were worth it in the long-run. “Know your priorities and what’s important to you. For us, it was important to figure out our goals and pay off debt,” Sherrie says. She quotes one of Ramsey’s bits of wisdom: “Adults make a plan and stick to it, and children just do whatever they feel like doing.” Going forward, their “adult plan” is to put aside three to six months of living expenses into savings to avoid unexpected expenses or a job loss sending them back into debt.

How this could work for you

Finding financial peace is not just a fairy tale or a nice story for someone else, writes Dave Ramsey on his website. Just remember you’re not alone; there are resources that can help you get back on track. “Everyone deserves to feel confident about their finances,” reports Credit Karma, a company that supplies tools, education, and opportunities to get out of debt and improve your credit score. And take advantage of these tips for living debt-free here.

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The post How We Paid Off $18,000 in Debt in 18 Months appeared first on Reader's Digest.

This space program has been tested on animals

“In the early days of rocket science, no one knew what the effects of weightlessness would be,” writes Space.com. So rocket scientists launched animals— mainly dogs by Russia and monkeys and chimps by the United States— up into space to test the effects of space on living beings and determine whether humans could survive a trip to and from space. However, NASA clarifies it only sends animals into space when “absolutely necessary,” preferring instead to conduct experiments via computer modeling and the like. Find out 13 more things you never knew about space travel.

The post Animals That Made It to Space Before You Did appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Bill McDonnell was going crazy. Deer season had begun, but it was colder than usual, so here he was, sitting among the mounted bucks inside his house in Winchester, Virginia, watching winter through the windows.

Up until his late 80s, Bill hadn’t minded hunting in subzero temperatures, but he had slowed in the past few years. The snow-dusted mountains of the Shenandoah Valley were no place for a 92-year-old. He knew it. But, man, did he want to get outside.

Then, on December 15, the forecast brightened, and before he announced his intentions, his wife, Joanna McDonnell, knew what he was up to. The couple went through an old song and dance whenever this happened.

“You’re not going,” Joanna would say.

“I’m going,” Bill would shoot back.

Joanna would try to bargain. “You’re not taking your gun. Stay on a trail.”

“I’m hunting,” he’d say.

“Take a friend,” she’d reply.

“They’re all dead.”

“Take Bill Jr.” (Not possible that day. Bill McDonnell Jr. would be at a football game.)

Joanna: “You’re a dang old fool!”

Bill: “Agreed.”

But this particular day, Joanna didn’t even try to talk sense into her husband. Bill had fought in World War II and the Korean War. He’d been a sailor, and after that a soldier. A “country boy through and through,” he might respect his wife’s wishes on most topics, but not when it came to the call of the wild. There was a place he hadn’t hunted in a long time, and he wanted to get out there once more before he was too old.

The next morning, Bill woke up at four, grabbed his muzzleloader, and steered his Jeep toward Shenandoah Mountain. At the end of the old Laurel Run logging road, he hit the trail on foot.

It was about 7:30 a.m. and 25 degrees when the sun peeked through the trees. Bill had strict instructions from Joanna to be out of the woods by 2 p.m. and home by 3 p.m.—plenty of time before sunset, in case he missed the deadline. Which he often did.

Not long into the hike, he came upon a path he didn’t remember. Maybe this was a secret route to the king of all bucks. He took it.

As the temperature climbed through the 30s, Bill veered off and back onto the trail, looking for tracks and rubbings on trees, signs that a buck might be over the next ridge. He wouldn’t kill it—he just liked to get a trophy in the sight of his scope, enough of a kick to feel the blood surging in his old veins.

Then, around 11 a.m., he emerged into a clearing along a ridgeline. He’d walked farther than he’d suspected. “What the … ?” he muttered.

It seemed that his path up the mountain had meandered quite a bit. There might be a quicker route back to the Jeep—as the crow flies, anyway.

When thoughts of shortcuts come to mind, Bill looks at his left hand and remembers a little mishap he had in Hawaii. He and Joanna had taken a once-in-a-lifetime vacation for her 80th birthday. They needed an extra bag, so he took a sidewalk to a nearby store, then realized he could get back to the hotel quicker if he jumped a barrier and scrambled down an embankment. But he tripped and broke his wrist and hand. With the pins now bolting the hand together, he was lucky he could still use the thing at all.

But on this day, eyeing the line the crow would fly, Bill couldn’t help himself. I’ll just be extra careful, he reasoned, and began cutting his own path.

Before his descent, Bill had picked up a call from Joanna. “Who might this be?” he’d answered.

“Sounds like you’re still alive,” she’d said.

Bill figured he could drop into the valley, hunt a bit, tackle the next ridgeline, then maybe hunt a bit more. But the farther he snaked down through the forest, the thinner and deeper the ridges became. Before long, the canyon narrowed to a rock chute. Next thing he knew, he was looking straight down from the top of a waterfall, 100, or maybe 200, feet high.

He looked to his right and saw a 20-foot-high wall of nearly vertical rock. Behind him, the ravine he’d followed down the mountain looked steeper and longer than he’d thought it was. To his left, the wall was slightly less vertical, slightly more creviced, slightly more covered in thick laurel roots.

He knew what he should do: go back up the ravine. But if he scaled that rock to the left, he could continue across and down the ridgeline. He would make it to the Jeep in time.

Bill began the climb, carefully plotting each step, grabbing the fattest root, tugging it to test its sturdiness, then heaving himself up to reach the next solid perch, and the next one, and so on. He tried not to look down.

He kept pushing upward until, finally, he hurled himself onto the shelf atop the rock wall. Everything burned. He needed a rest.

By the time Bill got going again, it was nearing 2:45 p.m. Descending into the valley, he came to a trail marked by white blazes. He remembered that one of his granddaughters had mentioned seeing a waterfall while she was climbing in the area, so he called her for advice. He described the ravine, the rock walls, and the white-blazed trail that he thought might take him back to the Jeep. “It looks pretty easy,” he said.

She didn’t remember the trail. Grandpa, she begged him, go back to the ridgeline.

But he wanted to take the trail. “I’ve got it figured out,” he said, then realized he was talking to air. His phone had died.

He dug into his pants for the GPS device he always brought in case of emergency and pushed the “on” button. Nothing. He had forgotten to charge it.

The trail looked to be angling downward in the right direction. Soon, though, it turned and began to climb away from the road where the Jeep was parked. So Bill decided to take another shortcut. He began bushwhacking, stopping occasionally to adjust course. He reached the valley. No road.

No, I’m not lost, he told himself. His eye caught a stand of tall trees. He remembered admiring the line of majestic oaks and pines earlier. Reach them and the car wouldn’t be that far off. He’d have to cover some ground, but part of it looked like an area loggers had clear-cut. How bad could it be?

As it turned out, the loggers had left behind a gnarly thicket of limbs and branches; laurel, prickly greenbrier, and other vines had sprouted up into a web of a billion needles in the pockets between the debris. Crawling through barbed wire in Korea, Bill thought, would be better than this.

He was moving slower and slower, Joanna’s 3 p.m. deadline having long since vanished. Eventually, the sun slipped below the mountain ridge behind him and the forest turned pitch-black. He hadn’t brought a flashlight. His quivering legs felt as if they’d stomped at least 15 miles.

There was only one thing to say: “McDonnell, you’ve really done it this time. You are one dumb son of a b—.”

***

Bill McDonnell Jr. was entering the football stadium at James Madison University when he got a text from his niece. She said she’d lost contact with her grandfather around 2 p.m. and no one had heard from him in hours. “I’m sure he ignored you and took the shortcut,” Bill Jr. told her.

An avid hiker himself, Bill Jr. knew his father could cover ten miles with all his winter gear on. But he had become more forgetful in his 90s. They agreed to call 911.

Bill Jr. headed to Winchester, where he found his mother in a panic, rifling through paperwork. She said she wanted to make sure she had the necessary documents in case her husband was dead.

Capt. Wesley Dellinger of the Shenandoah County Sheriff ’s Office sprang into action when he got the call about a missing elderly man: not quite six feet tall, 200 pounds, lost in the forest. Having made a few wrong turns in these woods himself, he felt for the guy. “You think you’ve got it figured out,” he told one of his deputies, “then all of a sudden you don’t.”

He ordered a command post to be set up near the Laurel Run trailhead, and by 6:30 p.m., he’d assembled personnel from within an hour’s radius in every direction. But Bill’s last location was in an area far too rugged and remote to attempt a full ground search, especially under a moonless sky.

So the sheriff sent his deputies out to cruise the highways and back roads, hoping Bill might have found his way to a thoroughfare. Around 9 p.m., a helicopter from the Fairfax County Police Department arrived.

It was about 9:45 p.m. when Bill heard the whoop-whoop-whoop of a helicopter and looked up from his makeshift bed. He had never minded bedding down in dirt—just make a little sleeping mat from branches, a trick he learned in the Army.

Now, as the light from the chopper danced closer, Bill struggled to rouse his achy joints and get to his feet. He managed to lift his orange hunter’s hat to the sky and wave. “I’m here!” he yelled.

The chopper hovered directly above him. But the mix of tall trees and low laurel canopies were too dense for its searchlight to penetrate. The light dimmed, and the whir of the helicopter blades softened. Bill guessed they wouldn’t be back until morning.

He tried to go to sleep but couldn’t quiet his head. He hated that search crews were wasting resources and losing sleep because he’d taken one too many shortcuts. Joanna was probably terrified. He wanted to get up and power through the darkness, but he knew he’d only end up in more trouble.

***

Shortly after midnight, Captain Dellinger’s phone rang. It was the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, offering its search-and-rescue drone. At $94,000 (for the device, training, and maintenance), the quadcopter, as it is officially called, is the hot new gear all search-and-rescue chiefs want but few can afford.

The following morning, as the silhouette of the mountains emerged, teams of rescuers with bloodhounds started on the trail Bill had hiked. At the same time, Loudoun County master deputy Matthew Devaney and his copilot, Jamie Holben, set up a launch area for the drone, then waited for the signal to send it out.

This was the first time they would fly the drone in a real rescue situation. Any failure would be red meat for detractors, who called it a taxpayer-funded toy. The device has a three-mile line of sight and a high-definition camera so powerful, Devaney says, “you can see the nose on a guy’s face on the ground from 400 feet up.”

At 9 a.m., it was time. As Devaney worked the joysticks, Holben called out adjustments. Threading the drone between tall trees, they sent it flying toward the search area.

At the same time, one of the tracking teams came upon a spot where some branches had been tamped down into a sort of mattress. They had heard the lost hunter was an old woodsman. Such a comfortable nest had to be the work of a master’s hand.

***

That morning, Bill had woken before dawn, replaying his wrong turns and imagining his wife’s despair. He never worried once that he wouldn’t find his way back, only about what would be waiting for him when he got there.

Just after 7 a.m., the sky lightened and the thicket around him began to reappear. He ate a few snacks and got ready to battle with the laurel.

The light was still bad, and each step took some thought to avoid thorns or a twisted ankle. After about 15 minutes, Bill came to a spot where he could see the landscape around him more clearly. There, only a few hundred yards away, was the line of trees he had been hoping to reach the night before.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” he yelled to the woods.

Within 15 more minutes, Bill emerged from the thicket and began a slow ascent to the ridgeline. He knew the trackers couldn’t be too far away. He began pushing himself harder. He’d better make it to the Jeep before they made it to him.

Now that the deputies had the drone up, they could see the forest as clear as a crow. But they saw little except white rock and scattered trees, and after about 20 minutes in the air, the battery slipped below 25 percent. They’d have to land the device and switch batteries if they didn’t get a bead on the lost man pretty soon.

The drone flew up and over a ridgeline capped by tall oak and pine trees, only about a half mile away. A neon-orange dot moved below. Zooming the camera in, the image became clear: The orange dot was a hunter’s cap.

“I think we have him!” Devaney shouted.

Down below, Bill began walking more briskly—the terrain was finally familiar, and he was sure he was less than a mile from the Jeep. He saw a large black animal bounding toward him out of the corner of his eye—a bear, maybe? He had seen some scat. But before he could reach for his gun, he realized it was a dog.

“Bill!” a voice called. “William! Bill McDonnell!”

“I’m up here,” he yelled back.

Damn trackers had beaten him after all.

***

It’s not that he wasn’t thankful for the “neat little contraption” that had helped rescue him, or for the young people who’d traipsed through the cold forest in search of an old-timer. It was more that he was embarrassed, and frustrated with all the fuss. Even the local news channels had shown up.

“Half hour more daylight and I would have been fine,” he told the rescuers.

The next day, Bill Jr. was tasked with sitting his dad down and having “the talk.” “I said, ‘The whole family was extremely scared, especially Mom,’” Bill Jr. recalls. “‘You can’t go out alone anymore.’”

Bill agreed to swear he wouldn’t go out hunting or hiking alone again.

But a week later, during a short hike—with company—he waffled a bit. “I need to keep that promise,” he said. “But the idea of it drives me crazy. I love walking around in these woods alone.”

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The post This 92-Year-Old Man Was Still an Accomplished Hiker—But Then He Went Missing appeared first on Reader's Digest.

What to do when you’re: kidnapped at gunpoint

Around 9:30 on a cold March morning, a 17-year-old girl 
was carjacked at gunpoint in Wildwood, New Jersey. This was 
unexpected. The identity of the woman holding the gun on her was not.

In the preceding weeks, the teenager had given her newborn baby up for adoption. Forty-five-year-old Floribert Nava—the woman now pointing a gun at her—desperately wanted the child and was devastated when a Philadelphia family was 
chosen instead. It seemed she was not taking no for an answer. “Drive,” Nava said, “or I’ll kill you and your family.”

Nava demanded she be taken to the home of the baby’s new parents, on the other side of the Delaware River. Besides the pistol, Nava carried with her duct tape, trash bags, and latex gloves. Whatever this woman was planning, the 17-year-old thought, it was going to be violent, and it was going to happen soon. As they were crossing the Ben Franklin Bridge into Pennsylvania, the teen spotted a police cruiser pulled over on the shoulder. Could she somehow get this cop’s attention without getting shot by her kidnapper first?

Smart move: The girl pointed her car toward the cruiser and rammed it.

The result: She got the officer’s attention! With the kidnapper stunned, the girl leaped out of the car to safety. Nava was arrested on kidnapping, carjacking, and weapons charges and has since been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

What the expert says: “This kid saw an opportunity to break free and took it,” says Bob Cooke, a retired special agent for the California 
Department of Justice. “When you have one opportunity to escape, 
you can’t hesitate. I’ve had guns pulled on me a few times, and the first thing that happens is you have the wind sucked out of you. When your wits come back, you have to 
try to catch your attacker in a weak moment and bail out.” Here’s how this 11-year-old boy saved his friend from being kidnapped.

What to do when you’re: cornered by 
a mountain lion

In August 2014, artist Kyra Kopestonsky was enjoying a hike through one of her favorite parks near her home in Placerville, Colorado. Even when straying off the trail, as she had that day, she had never once seen a mountain lion in the wild. Until now.

When she heard a twig snap behind her, “I turned, and there it was,” Kopestonsky told 9News, “a mountain lion, standing ten to 15 feet away from me.” Kopestonsky knew not to run or make any sudden movements. Calmly, she started to back away.

The lion crept forward.

She stopped; the lion crouched. She grabbed a tree branch to make herself look like a bigger predator; the lion didn’t budge. For 20 minutes, no matter what move Kopestonsky made, the lion only advanced, once pouncing within a few feet of her. The big cat was stalking Kopestonsky, and she didn’t know whether she could make it back to the trailhead—and, she hoped, to help—without 
being attacked. With adrenaline taking over, Kopestonsky decided to try something radical.

Smart move: At the top of her lungs, Kopestonsky sang opera.

The result: The lion backed off. “It put its ears down and just kept looking at me,” Kopestonsky said, “and it sort of backed away.” She called her roommate, who alerted authorities. After the lion retreated, Kopestonsky calmly walked back to the trailhead, where several deputies waited to meet her.

What the expert says: “There’s a general rule in the animal kingdom: Prey runs away,” says 
Amy Rodrigues, resident biologist 
of the Mountain Lion Foundation. “By standing her ground and making loud noises, [Kopestonsky] proved 
to the lion that she was a person—not a dinner.” Find out what happened when these seven high school boys were attacked by a bear.

What to do when you’re: stranded in Saskatchewan

One day in May 2010, several 
hundred people on the shore of 
Wollaston Lake, in Saskatchewan, were plunged into darkness for nearly 30 hours. In the woods of northern Saskatchewan, temperatures can fall below freezing even in the middle of May, and this had been a particularly frigid week. Now the lights and heat were out, and nobody knew why. Except for one man.

Shivering on a distant bank of 
Wollaston, a lone outdoorsman 
hunkered under the overturned boat where he had survived the past few days, marooned between a frozen lake and an impassable forest. The man, just visiting, had paddled up from a nearby river when bad weather trapped him between ice floes, stranding him. Now, after several days without food or proper shelter, the man was running out of ideas. Waiting for the ice to melt was not an 
option; neither was wandering blindly into the bear-infested backwoods. He had no phone. He had no fire. All he had was his boat—and an ax.

Smart move: The man found the nearest electrical pole and chopped it down. Then he chopped down three more. Hoping this was enough to knock out service in the nearest town, thus forcing the power company to come and investigate, the man returned to his boat and waited.

The result: Within 24 hours, SaskPower, the local utility company, chartered a helicopter crew to investigate the power outage. The team members found the would-be lumberjack waiting by the fallen poles, looking very happy to see them.

What the expert says: While SaskPower is quick to remind people to stay away from electrified power lines, Bruce Zawalsky, founder of Canada’s Boreal Wilderness Institute for outdoor education, was impressed. “Improvisation saved this man’s life, and that’s good,” he says. “It’s pretty desolate up there. Power lines stretch across impassable lakes and rivers, trees are up to 50 feet high, and he could’ve walked for miles before finding help.” This 92-year-old man was still an accomplished hiker—but then he went missing.

What to do when you’re: freezing in the mountains

The kids were promised an adventure in the snow. Now huddled with their parents in an overturned Jeep, the outside temperature dropping to 
21 degrees below zero, they would 
be lucky to survive it.

In December 2013, James Glanton and his girlfriend, Christina McIntee, arranged a weekend outing in 
Nevada’s Seven Troughs mountain range. Along for the ride were their two kids plus McIntee’s young niece and nephew, all ages three to ten. 
The family had the back roads 
to itself as it cruised through the mountains in Glanton’s silver Jeep Wrangler. Rolling downhill too fast, the Jeep hit a patch of ice. Within a few terrifying seconds, the vehicle skidded off the dirt road, tumbled onto its top, and slid upside down into the bottom of a snowy ravine.

Luckily, nobody was injured—but the passengers were stranded in a chasm in the middle of nowhere, and the subzero night was closing in. The Jeep’s interior wouldn’t stay warm long, and the winter coats they’d packed wouldn’t be much help. If they wanted to survive, they would have to get creative, and fast.

Smart move: They built an 
improvised radiator. After starting a bonfire with sagebrush and matches, Glanton and McIntee heated up some rocks, loaded them into a spare tire, then placed it in the Jeep’s 
interior to keep the kids warm through the night. With heat secured, the family stayed put and waited for help.

The result: They survived the 
48 hours it took for the search party to rescue them and walked away without serious injuries or frostbite despite the subzero temperatures.

What the experts say: Sticking with the vehicle was important, survival expert Joseph Teti told CNN. By contrast, when a Canadian couple got lost in the Nevada wilderness in 2011, the husband left their stranded van to look for help and died. (His wife was found alive in their car 49 days later.) Burning rocks for warmth was another “good idea,” Dr. Zach Sturges of Salt Lake City’s Intermountain 
Institute for Disaster 
Preparedness told nbcnews
.com. “Rocks make a great thermal mass if you can build an outside fire to heat them.” Learn about 6 people who froze to death—and came back to life.

What to do when you’re: abused and afraid

Calling 911 to order a pizza might not seem very daring, but it may have saved one woman’s life. Unable to 
request police assistance while her abusive boyfriend was in the room, the woman made the following call to 
a 911 dispatcher:

Caller: I’d like to order a pizza for delivery.
Dispatcher: Ma’am, you’ve reached 911.
Caller: Yeah, I know. Can I have 
a large with half pepperoni, half mushroom and peppers?
Dispatcher: I’m sorry—you know you’ve called 911, right?
Caller: Yeah. Do you know how long it will be?
Dispatcher: OK, ma’am, is everything OK over there? Do you have an emergency?
Caller: Yes, I do.
Dispatcher: And you can’t talk about it because there’s someone in the room with you?
Caller: Yes, that’s correct. Do you know how long it will be?
Dispatcher: I have an officer 
about a mile from your location. Are there any weapons in your house?
Caller: Nope.
Dispatcher: Can you stay on the phone with me?
Caller: Nope. See you soon; thanks.

The result: An officer was dispatched to the house, where the 
caller’s violently drunk boyfriend 
was arrested. After the dispatcher 
later recounted this call on Reddit, it instantly went viral and even inspired 
a Super Bowl commercial for the anti–domestic violence campaign No More. Make sure you know these 10 early warning signs of an abusive relationship.

What the expert says: 
“Every woman is her own expert on her own life,” says Maureen Curtis of the Safe Horizon victims’ services agency. “This woman clearly knew that calling the police outright could escalate the violence or become lethal. It really speaks to how victims of abuse can be creative in seeking help—for example, we’ve worked with women in abusive relationships who have a secret signal with their neighbors or their kids.” Next, make sure you know these 42 everyday fixes to survive basically anything.

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My Wife Was Left to Die at the ER Door

The post 5 Split-Second Decisions People Made That Saved Their Own Lives appeared first on Reader's Digest.

What was it that stopped the train that day? Signal problems? Wet leaves? A body on the tracks? Whatever it was, 
the train was running late again. Which meant I’d be an hour, maybe two, maybe three, late to work again. Which meant I’d be staying late and 
not getting home until long after the kids had gone to bed. Again.

I was well into my second year writing for the Washington Post, a dream job by any measure. Except for one tiny problem. The Post is based in Washington, D.C. My wife, Briana, and I, along with our two-year-old twins, Jack and Charles, lived just outside of Baltimore. Between our home and the Post newsroom lay about 80 miles of commute, 90 to 120 minutes by car, train, subway, and foot. On a good day.

That damp August morning in 2015? Not shaping up to be a good day.

But what choice did we have, given that the median home value in Washington, D.C., is somewhere north of half a million dollars, which was well out of the realm of affordability for Briana, who worked for the Social Security Administration, and me? We knew we had to do something about our situation. But no matter how far outside the box we started to think, we couldn’t make the numbers add up.

Then, later that summer, I wrote an article that would change my life. I had stumbled across an obscure project of the U.S. Department of Agriculture examining the physical characteristics that most people would agree make a place pleasant to live in—things like hills, valleys, bodies of water, nice weather. The project ranked America’s 3,000 counties from “ugliest” to the most scenic.

Ventura County, California, came in at number one on the list—not surprising, given the shore, the hills, and the temperate climate. The county that came in last was a little place I’d never heard of called Red Lake County, in the northwest corner of Minnesota. It turns out Red Lake County doesn’t have any actual lakes. Or any hills. The summers are hot, and the winters are brutally cold. You crunch all those numbers together on a spreadsheet, and you wind up with “the worst place to live in America.”

My story went up on the Washington Post website at 9:27 on a Monday morning. By 9:32, the hate mail had started rolling in. By mid­morning, people had started sending me photographs of golden wheat fields, meandering rivers, and deep blue prairie skies. “This is what the ‘worst place in America to live in’ looks like in late summer,” one of them said. The photographs eventually morphed into a hashtag campaign, #ShowMeYourUglyCounties.

In a lighthearted attempt at amends-
making, I rounded up a bunch of the best responses and published them in a follow-up piece titled “Thick Coats, Thin Skins: Why Minnesotans Were Outraged by a Recent Washington Post Report.” Shortly after, I got an e-mail with the subject line “An invitation to come visit Red Lake County.” It was from a guy named Jason Brumwell. His family, he wrote, owned a river tubing business based in Red Lake Falls, the county seat with a population of 1,427. “I would like to cordially and officially invite you to come and check out our little county, which has now been dubbed ‘The Worst County in the United States,’ ” he said. “I would also like to reassure you that you would be given plenty of good-natured ‘ribbing’ but would be greeted with open arms and a lot of people showing you why they feel our county is far from the worst.”

A few days later, I was on a plane. The closest “major” airport (with just two gates) is in Grand Forks, North Dakota, 40 miles away. As I flew in, the view outside the airplane window was a rigid grid, straight roads stretching out to the horizon, interrupted only by other straight roads running perpendicularly. Everything was flat, square. It certainly looked as if it could be America’s worst place to live.

I had done some reading to find out what kind of place I’d be parachuting into. By most economic measures, the county seemed to be doing OK. The unemployment rate that July was 4.4 percent, well below the national average. The median household income was $48,000—less than half the typical income in the Washington suburbs where I lived. The median home value, on the other hand, was $89,000, or one-fifth the typical home price in our area.

The county was home to just a hair over 4,000 people, 95 percent of whom were white. The median age was 42. The big business was farming; just 1.6 percent of the land area was devoted to towns and residences. It was home to approximately twice as many cows as people. A picture was starting to emerge in my head of a place not unlike the hard­scrabble farming communities that surrounded Oneonta, New York, where Briana and I had grown up.

Jason Brumwell had warned me to prepare for “a huge helping of Minnesota nice.” At his suggestion, I took the “back way” from Grand Forks to Red Lake Falls. What struck me wasn’t the flatness or the emptiness or the complete lack of people or cars; it was the sky.

Unencumbered by hills and valleys, the sky seemed impossibly vast to my East Coast eyes, a clear blue dome dotted by poofy clouds straight out of a children’s book. The horizon was truly infinite, the sense of scale and space and openness almost humbling.

A large wooden sign proclaimed “Welcome to Red Lake Falls,” and there weren’t just a handful of people waiting to meet me, as Jason had ­suggested—there were dozens, including four or five camera crews and a color guard from the high school.

Jason and his dad, Dick Brumwell, found me, and after a quick press conference, they loaded me and a gaggle of reporters and local luminaries onto a roofless red bus—one of the fleet they used to ferry tubers to the river launch—and took us to a dairy farm owned by brothers Carl and Joe Schindler. Carl asked whether I wanted to check out the inside of the barn, and, yes, of course I did. I had some experience with dairy farms growing up. My dad was a large-­animal veterinarian, and in my childhood I would ride around to farms with him in lieu of day care or any other more structured and costly activity.

When we got to the farm, I bounded off the bus and made my way over to the calf pens. A newborn calf suckled my thumb as the Schindler brothers told me about life on the farm. A member of one of the camera crews tried to follow us into the barn but ended up retching, overcome by the smell.

“Smells great to me,” I said. “Smells like home.”

The next activity was a kayak ride down the Red Lake River. The river was tranquil, carving deep meanders through the landscape. Dusty cliffs rose up on one side and then the other, pocked with holes where swallows nested.

Afterward I stopped by my motel room to get a shower before dinner at T&J’s, the local bar and grill. The folks at T&J’s were outgoing and eager to talk about what made their community so special: Al Buse, for instance, who at 101 was the oldest resident of Red Lake Falls—and “like everyone’s grandpa,” Jason told me. Al was the grandson of one of the town’s original founders, and he was, it seemed, the living, breathing avatar of what made the town tick. Every morning when the weather was nice, he would load his tools in the back of his bright yellow golf cart and make his way through town, fixing things that needed fixing, watering plants, and generally doing whatever he could to keep the town tidy.

When I settled in for the night, I let Briana know I was safe, untarred and unfeathered. I had dozens of ­Facebook notifications, friend requests from Minnesotans I had met earlier in the day. Minnesota nice, indeed.

The next day, Jason showed up in a bus with a sign reading “America’s Worst Tour” displayed above the windshield. We visited a wheat farm in Brooks (population 139), where fourth-generation farmer Alex Yaggie let me drive his combine. We stopped at an asparagus farm and sampled from a jar of fiercely flavorful pickled asparagus. We stopped at the Plummer Area Sportsmen’s Club, where county commissioner Chuck Simpson—who’d said in response to my original story that I could kiss his butt—showed me around the shooting range.

Spend a little bit of time in Red Lake County and you’ll notice that people here are highly invested in their community. See that little park with the gazebo on Main Street? Dick Brumwell built it as a memorial to his late wife. See the garden on the hill across the street from the county courthouse? That’s a project of the local ­Lions Club. And that train-shaped light display on the old railroad trestle during the holidays? That’s the brainchild of Jim Benoit, who thought people should have something nice to look at when they drive into town.

People rarely lock their doors in Red Lake County, even when they’re not home. People trust each other so much that they often leave their cars running with the keys in the ignition when they run into Brent’s to pick up some groceries. Kids often run around unsupervised well into the evening hours—not a problem when you trust the folks in your neighborhood to keep an eye out for any trouble.

When I returned home, Briana noticed that I wouldn’t stop talking about how great the people were. Their warmth, their friendliness, their determination to make their community better. Jammed into a hot, overcrowded train, I thought of the guy who complained about how getting stuck behind a tractor could add five minutes to his 15-minute commute. When I’d told people in Red Lake Falls that sometimes I spent five hours a day commuting to and from work, their jaws had dropped.

They had their own trials and headaches, of course. Downtown wasn’t what it once had been. Affordable health care was a challenge. The sheriff’s office had the occasional speeder or shoplifter to deal with. But the people were rising up to meet their challenges. When the town pool needed work, they held a carnival and other events to pull together $70,000.

Once I was back at the grind in D.C., my days in Red Lake County took on a positively Norman Rockwellian cast. The pressures of modern life seemed manageable there. I wanted to take my family to a place with wide-open spaces of possibility, with room to breathe. I wanted what the people in Red Lake County seemed to have.

One weekend, my mom and stepdad flew in from Tampa to visit. The boys were in bed, and the four adults were unwinding in our tiny living room. Briana and I were talking through all these issues—the boys, the house, the jobs, the commutes, and how we couldn’t find a way out of any of it.

My mom said, “Well, what if you moved to that nice little Minnesota town Chris visited over the summer?”

We all laughed.

“No, really,” she said.

The room went quiet.

For me, in that moment, suddenly all the pieces fell into place. One of us would work from home. The other would take a break from working to be with the kids, which we could afford given the low cost of living.

Over the next few days, a plan gradually came into focus. Once my bosses approved my request to work remotely, it was official. We sat down with the boys, then two and a half, and said, “We’re going to live in Minnesota.”

“Minsota,” they said. They had no idea what it meant, but the word soon became a universal totem of anticipation in the house, encompassing all our hopes, dreams, anxieties, our struggle for a better life. Minnesota.

The following May we moved to Red Lake Falls. Our family—me; Briana; Jack; Charles; Tiber, our 70-pound beagle-basset mix; and Ivy, our 12-year-old cat—arrived on a Sunday. The closing on the house was scheduled for the following day, but the previous owners, the Kleins, told us they’d leave the door open and the keys on the kitchen counter. We hadn’t even gotten the kids out of their car seats before we were enthusiastically greeted by our new neighbor, who wanted to know whether we played any instruments because there was a great little community band and they were always looking for new players.

The Brumwells and the Kleins came over to help us get all our stuff out of the moving van. A few neighbors wandered over to pitch in as well, and with their help, we wrapped up the job in just a couple of hours.

It was an auspicious beginning, and our family quickly acclimated to small-town life. Briana volunteered for the Civic and Commerce Committee and was persuaded to run for city council, an election she handily won. The boys soon thrived under the personal attention at J. A. Hughes Elementary—even Charlie, who was diagnosed with autism and might’ve gotten lost in the crowd in a larger public school, like the one we had left in Maryland.

Most of the things we missed, including curry paste, sparkling wine, and books the tiny library doesn’t offer, we were able to order online or ask local proprietors to stock for us. We found plenty of culture and diversity, although we had to actively seek it out rather than experiencing the world simply by walking down the street, the way you can in a big city. The twins, now six, have spent more birthdays in Minnesota than they did in Maryland. And we have another son, William, who is three. I can honestly say that there would have been no William had we not moved to Red Lake Falls.

It is my job to write about data. I’m a big believer in its power. But our relocation has been a humbling reminder of the limitations of numbers. It has opened my eyes to all the things that get lost when you abstract people, places, and points in time down to a number on a computer screen.

Yes, the government’s natural-­amenities index accurately captures the flatness of midwestern farm country. The summer heat. The bitter winter cold. But it misses so much about that landscape: the sound of the breeze rustling the grain or the way the wheat catches the light; the dry-sweet smell of a field of sunflowers. It doesn’t tell you how a family can keep itself warm through the coldest of winters by building igloos and sledding down the town hill. Or how the vast winter night sky shines with the light of thousands of stars that people who live in cities will never know. It doesn’t tell you about the heat put off by a big roaring fire in a park at the darkest time of the year, how the glow dances on the faces of those gathered around.

The people of Red Lake Falls bring light to the darkness and warmth to the cold. Glancing around the bonfire at last winter’s train-lighting ceremony, when everyone clapped and cheered, I felt certain: We were home.

Next, learn about the nicest places in America.

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Most Charming Small Town in Every State

Moving to a Small Town: What No One Tells You

The post Moving My Family to the “Worst” Place in America Was the Best Decision I Ever Made appeared first on Reader's Digest.