Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dusty truck loaded with guns and radio gear rolls down the Arizona highway south toward Nogales and the Mexican border, Bernell E. ("Bernie") Lawrence points toward a range of mountains. "O.K.," he drawls in a desert-dry voice, "where's the place up there you'd look for lion tracks?" He already knows. "Lions like the backbone of a set of mountains. They'll cross where two canyons meet. For them it's like climbing stairs." Lawrence is 48. For much of his life he tracked and killed mountain lions, bears and coyotes. Then society...
...early '70s when narcotics traffic from Mexico increased, he reluctantly became a "narc." For about five years, Lawrence and a select team stalked the desert like a posse out of the Old West. They seized millions of dollars' worth of drugs and airplanes, and scores of smugglers who had figured the harsh, 13,000-sq.-mi. wastes of the desert could serve as a safe private landing field. In one successful two-week camp-out near a remote airstrip, his team bagged a DC-10, two tons of marijuana, a four-wheel-drive truck and four smugglers...
Sunbelt cities like Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston (where shivering indoor frigidity became a mark of status) could never have mushroomed so prosperously without air conditioning; some communities-Las Vegas in the Nevada desert and Lake Havasu City on the Arizona-California border-would shrivel and die overnight if it were turned...
...many strange and illuminating episodes in Janet Frame's tenth novel concerns an Englishman's experiment with truth-seeking in the desert. He chooses a simmering patch of wasteland east of Berkeley, Calif., and in a few hours discovers that his dry run is the real thing. As he waits under a road sign for his wife to return, a jackrabbit bounds into his shadow to cool off. This is followed by three rapid epiphanies. First, that his life was a gift to himself and others and that even his share of sunlight and shadow did not belong...
...their sole heir. She is also advised that the departed had invited four others to use the house, and that it would be kind if Alice let them come. When they arrive, she becomes distracted from her work in progress and writes instead about her guests: the British desert lover, described as an "experiential snob," because he thinks that his search for God makes him superior to his wife who quests only for a better Parmesan cheese; a 60-year-old soil erosion specialist who fancies himself the savior of other people's lives and careers; and his young...