Word: canyoneering
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...would be hard for someone who started college in 1969 to be an undercover freshman. My speech would betray me as surely as my graying hair. Awesome is a word I would use to describe the Grand Canyon -- not the latest Jon Bon Jovi album, which is, like, totally awesome to my young classmates. Still, some - collegespeak can be surprisingly descriptive. "Yeah, it was great," one student says of his summer vacation in Paris. "Except I felt like a total Piltdown when I tried to order food." I know exactly what he means...
Another plant is overrunning parts of the Southwest, including the Grand Canyon. Introduced about 70 years ago to act as an erosion fighter and windbreak, the tamarisk tree has taken over about 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres), pushing out native trees and threatening eight species of birds that nest in them. The Grand Canyon's major animal offenders are burros; turned loose by prospectors generations ago, they have grown into vegetation- devouring herds...
Large animals can be either killed or removed, but that sometimes causes problems of another sort: a burro-shooting program at the Grand Canyon had to be halted after a public outcry. In Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, though, a population of 15,000 or so feral goats was reduced to only 4, and in the Smokies the wild boar population has been pared. Smaller animals are much harder to fight, and plants harder still. Herbicides kill too indiscriminately, and bringing in new exotic species to control the old is demonstrably dangerous. Rangers often have to resort to chopping down...
...call Souter bookish would be like describing the Grand Canyon as a hole in the ground. In the ramshackle farmhouse nine miles outside Concord where he has lived since he was 11, groaning shelves of books on philosophy, history and the law have won the battle for space. Souter jokes that the room looks like "someone was moving a bookstore and stopped." Vacations are devoted to rereading as much of the work of a particular author as he can; he has plowed through Dickens, Proust, Shakespeare and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the legendary Supreme Court Justice. When he is not reading...
This gap -- more like a canyon -- between the Art World and the Real World seems particularly sad in Holzer's case, since the one thing she evidently yearns to do is make contact with a wide public by showering it with improving mottos, printed on posters, zapping from light-emitting diode boxes, and even carved in stone: EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL, for instance, or ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE. In the late '70s, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Holzer was smitten by an insight. To subvert the slow and, natch, "elitist...