Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...high mesa framed by a fiery desert sky, the dancers appear: with eerie spectral masks, flesh painted in earthy clay and turquoise colors, and swathed in skins. The kachina priests whirl through the dusty streets of the village clacking tortoise rattles, chanting, waving yucca switches. Hopi legends say these "messengers of the Creator" have returned from the San Francisco mountains to begin anew the natural and spiritual cycle of planting and harvest. The desert will be blessed and purified and nourished by rain. An hour's drive north of the high mesa, on desolate scrubland wreathed by a dark...
...virtual colonies in Eastern Europe to the Bering Strait off the top of Alaska, across two continents and eleven time zones; more than 3,000 miles? roughly the distance from New York to San Francisco?separate the ice fields of the Arctic Ocean from the sun-parched Kara Kum Desert. The 262.4 million citizens of the U.S.S.R. belong to more than 100 ethnic groups and claim descent from Varangians, Turks, Mongols and countless Eurasian tribes. Their government preaches to them, in Russian, about the supreme wisdom of a 19th century German atheist. They, however, speak in more than 100 tongues...
...stories and the images flash by in tantalizing bits: a forest of radio telescopes in New Mexico that look like giant desert toadstools; shrimplike creatures that are found under the ice of Antarctica; a microscopic closeup of a sugar cube dissolving, creating a miniature tidal wave in a glass of water. The cameras record the compelling beauty of the scientist's search, as well as its frequent frustration and occasional loneliness...
Then Nelson and Ruff began what turned into a 15-mile, ten-hour trek away from the mountain, over what Nelson calls a "white-hot desert" of ash. They soon joined up with a 60-year-old man. The three kept up their spirits by singing bawdy songs. In late afternoon they heard helicopters overhead and waved some of their clothes to stir up a dust cloud large enough to attract the pilot's attention. They were rescued, and choppers soon carried out Balch and Thomas as well...
...like an ashtray, Ritzville looked as though it had been hit by an avalanche. The town was caked in dust and mud. Streets had 2-ft. drifts. On South Adams Street, Mrs. Erma Miller's once meticulously landscaped ranch-style house looked as if it were in a desert. The lawn had disappeared almost completely. Branches were broken from two formerly flowering hawthornes. There was a 4-ft. drift on the patio. Said Mrs. Miller, leaning on her snow shovel: 'You ought to see the inside. You can't keep the dust out.' "Within hours...