Word: mountainous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Tiny Thistle, Utah, a historic railroading town 60 miles south of Salt Lake City, was once considered an idyllic mountain retreat. No longer. Unglued by record spring rains, a 125-ft. wall of muddy earth swept into nearby Spanish Fork Canyon two weeks ago, backing up the small Spanish Fork River for two miles and creating a natural lake, 50 to 80 ft. deep, that has swallowed up the hapless hamlet. Residents of the town's 22 homes fled, and no lives were lost. But despite attempts to drain the new lake, the water has continued to rise...
Last month the San Joaquin River, flush with mountain runoff, broke through a levee near Vernalis in Northern California and washed out 10 sq. mi. of prime farmland. Farther upstream, in central California's Kings County, rains had already dunked 70,000 acres in floodwater; the runoff now threatens an additional 20,000 acres. "We're down here like a bathtub without a drain," fretted Farmer Don Gilkey, who had 4,000 of his 10,000 acres drowned...
...Communist attempt to take over Greece became an increasingly bloody failure in 1948, the desperate leftist guerrillas, driven back to a few mountain coverts, adopted a cruel strategy: a pedomasoma, a "gathering up of children." The young were taken from occupied villages and sent as hostages to Albania and other nearby Iron Curtain countries. Publicly the guerrillas said the children were being protected from the hazards of war. In fact, the plan was meant to terrorize their parents into subservience to the guerrillas and to indoctrinate the children as a new generation of revolutionaries...
Towering over Ararat is the mountain of the same name, a symbol of unattainable purity. The characters frequently invoke it, or plan visits to Soviet Armenia so they may glimpse it in the mists. The shadow it casts upon the characters is the memory of the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915. Indeed, one important figure is Everyman's executioner, who improvises a story of how he participated in this and other mass murders...
...future cannot be quantified into dollars and cents. Although the settlement probably does not represent anything so consciously insensitive, people in this country are too quick to sue. Yelling for large sums of money has become the accepted way of resolving disagreements and solving problems--burying them in a mountain of dollar bills...