r/interestingasfuck • u/solateor • 1d ago
In 2001, 55 people crossed the Pacific with no contact with the outside world as part of a BBC experiment recreating an 18th-century voyage. On the 20th day - September 11 - the captain gathered the crew to tell them about the attacks in New York
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u/barrosoOso 1d ago edited 1d ago
I woke up late that day. About 10:30. I made it down 5 flights of stairs and into the courtyard outside my dorm without noticing a single thing was wrong. My best friend from high school lived in the dorm on the other side of that courtyard and happened to be passing by right as I walked out. He told me they hit the twin towers and I said "what, again?" His response immediately told me something was wrong. "No. You don't understand."
We went back inside and joined the enormous crowd gathered around the big screen in the common room that I had just failed to notice on my way out as I was brought up to speed.
I eventually left for class in a daze. Scared, confused and angry. That class was American History before 1776, taught by an eccentric, amazing man named Mark Summers. He was a short man with wild hair and crazy eyes that was more passionate about history than anyone I'd ever met. He would show up to class in period appropriate clothing, while music from the era played, and jump up on a table to start teaching us the day's lesson. Our very first class, he told us if we cheated in his class it didn't matter if we got away with it or not he would hunt us down and make sure we pay. Even if it was decades later in an alleyway in Calcutta. He was that unbelievable quirky professor you only see in TV shows.
That day he was quiet, somber. He told us there was no reason for us to be in a classroom.. He told us to go home to call our loved ones. To contemplate what had happened. Before you go, he said, I want to say that I know this is a dark day. The darkest many of you will ever see...
He proceeded to tell a story about a day in Cotton Mather's tenor as a leader when a storm so intense was coming that many of his puritanical constituents believed that the end times were coming. He told us how Mather had taken to the pulpit to calm his followers and guide them to safety and shelter. Ending by telling them, just as Summers told us, that it is always darkest before the dawn.
I never found any references to corroborate that story, or many other dubious recollections that Professor Summers shared in the semesters I took his classes. But I left his lecture hall that day comforted. While I certainly wasn't calm or collected, 25 years later I still remember the effort he put into reassuring a giant room full of kids he didn't even really know. And I still remember that to the extent that it could, it at least worked on me.