Word: desert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dusty stretch of track outside Colton, Calif., a railroad bull confronted three rumpled men about to hop a stalled desert-bound freight. "Turn around," ordered the policeman, resting one hand menacingy on his gun. Frisking the hoboes, the lawman squinted in disbelief: their driver's licenses bore upscale California addresses in West Los Angeles, Marin County and Palm Springs. "Beverly Glen Boulevard?" the policeman demanded of one robust tramp wearing suspenders and carrying a Swiss army knife. "What is this...
...heaving truck, leaving Colton amid a terrifying anvil chorus of wheels, cars and couplings stressing and whining. But a neophyte's raw nerves are soon lulled by the classic rhythms of clickety-clack, as he crawls into a warm sleeping bag to enjoy a moonlit panorama of passing desert and mountains unmarred by highway billboards...
...suspicious of meddlesome Government). Thus in the midst of the current nationwide drought, the 74 golf courses around Palm Springs, Calif., have plenty of cheap federal water to keep their sprinklers hissing, while Arizona farmers can afford to grow water- intensive crops like alfalfa in the middle of the desert. Little wonder: water in Palm Springs costs the golf courses just $18 an acre-foot...
...farmers waste water by choice. Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, an incisive history of water development in the West, observes that subsidized water is "so cheap the farmers can't afford to conserve it." Ten miles west of Phoenix, for example, Mike Duncan, 38, would have to spend considerably more to irrigate his cotton if he were to use water-saving drip tubes. "If I farmed in the Coolidge area, where water is $80 an acre-foot," Duncan says, "I'd most seriously look at using drip irrigation." Instead, Duncan gets water at the federally subsidized rate...
...last bellwether county. (Bellwether, literally, means the lead sheep in a flock.) The nation lost its other remaining perfect prognosticator in 1984, when Walter Mondale edged Reagan by 303 votes in Iowa's Palo Alto County. So this fall the pressure is on in this sparsely populated high desert, where cows outnumber residents and crew cuts never went out of fashion. "I don't know whether Crook County has some rare substance in the air that causes people to think like the average voter," muses County Judge Dick Hoppes. Jokes Barber Jake Lewis: "If it's in the water...