Word: highway
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...those rivers which spends its whole life trying to seduce a highway. Coiling, twisting, sprawling libidinously over rocks and sand, forever ruffling itself up, whispering, cajoling, the river only sought to make the road unbend. Meanwhile, the highway dodged back and forth from canyon wall to cliffside, avoiding the river's embrace, grinding grimly and duty-driven as straight and narrow as it could--in short, a coward of a highway with a yellow stripe down the middle of its back, vaulting over danger spots where the river threatened to merge. It was one highway the bulldozers and steamrollers...
...fertilizer around back there, mostly cow manure, that is, with pig and chicken droppings thrown in as a kicker. But you couldn't ask for a more pleasant ride--Mt. Pisgah National Forest, hills and dales, glinting little trickles sliding down valleys, evergreen air with the smell of steaming highway...
...road, just before a curve that cut into the cliff above. "Follow the path," he said. He handed me a baggie full of his homegrown. "Straight and narrow." (People are always screaming about the dangers of hitchhiking. Why, back in seventh grade they even showed us a Highway Patrol film about murdered hitchers. The truth is that anybody who'd pick up travelers as scruffy as most hitchhikers are has got to have an ungodly quotient of Good Samaritanism--especially in North Carolina, where the only other people who stop are the state cops Goes to show...
...bottom of the path down from the highway was the river, 30 feet wide, two to four inches deep, about to slant-drop over an immense 150-foot-long granite rock. And halfway down the rock were my five friends, hand-in-hand, sit-sliding...sploosh. They rode the tidal wave they made in the pearl-pool at the bottom, clambered out as if an ejector seat were pushing them, and toiled back up the path to where I was. Greetings, food, wine, smoke, sun, pine needles, my turn...
...Apologies. The Washingtonians, by contrast, have pressed ahead. The project has already cost $50 million, and it will require at least $12 million more. By Washington-style accounting, that works out to be little more than half of a B-l bomber or a few miles of interstate highway. Dean Sayre, who often uses his carved Gothic stone pulpit to promote social justice, makes no apologies for the expense. "You're not competing with the poor for a dollar," he has said. "You're building something in order to use it. The instrument and the using...