Word: desertic
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Despite all that has been learned, mistakes are still made. Last week four U.S. soldiers died when a rocket they were destroying exploded prematurely in the desert near Kandahar. Later a U.S. Air National Guard pilot killed four Canadians and seriously wounded eight others after mistaking muzzle flashes from a Canadian live-fire nighttime exercise for an enemy attack. The pilot dropped at least one 500-lb. laser-guided bomb on the allies...
...groves. The gun battle lasted 30 minutes. Since then Tzameret has slept no more than two hours a night, fearing intruders in the settlement where she lives, which has no perimeter fence. Each time she leaves the house she fears that she too might be ambushed on the winding desert road from her home in the Jordan Valley up to Jerusalem. She puts on clean underwear in case she's injured and hospitalized; she fills the refrigerator so that there will be enough food for her family during the week they might spend mourning her. "Every day I bury myself...
...always found the two-hour drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, Calif., to be deeply dislocating, in the best sense of the word. Route 111, the main approach to town, veers suddenly off from Interstate 10 to cut a jazzy angle across the desert, unplugging you at last from the freeway grid. Past the turnoff, the six-mile drive into town, with its surreal juxtaposition of ancient mountains and shiny new energy-producing windmills, seems to further separate you from the everyday. And then the big, welcoming surprise: the sharply angled roof of the Tramway Gas Station looming over...
...seems odd at first, all this low-slung elegance in the middle of a desert. In fact, it was almost inevitable, as Tony Merchell, an amateur architectural historian who has been deeply involved in the town's historic-preservation movement, told me. Wealthy Eastern and Midwestern business people followed movie stars to Palm Springs in the 1940s and '50s, at just the moment when Modernism was taking hold in California...
When it's time to call it a day, skip the overbearingly themed Ballantine's Movie Colony on Indian Canyon Drive and head to the neighboring town of Desert Hot Springs for a night at Hope Springs. Formerly a residential hotel, Hope Springs is a low-key and welcoming 10-room inn done over in an austere '50s style. Soak your tired feet in its flow-through system of three spring-fed mineral pools, and say hello to Hector, a wirehaired terrier rescued by manager Nancy Morgan from the surrounding desert. (The lobby fire pit, done over as a tile...