Word: picnicers
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...bright spring morning last week, three young Israeli officials took off by car from their liaison office in the Lebanese village of Dbayeh, on the outskirts of Beirut. Their destination: the ancient ruins of Byblos, about twelve miles to the north, where they ostensibly planned to sightsee and picnic. Inexplicably, however, they drove past their destination along the coastal road. They crossed Christian Phalange and Lebanese Army checkpoints without incident, then suddenly spotted a Syrian checkpoint straight ahead. Realizing that they had strayed into hostile territory, they turned the car around and tried to flee. Syrian soldiers opened fire...
...summer the adults leave for a one-day picnic, taking with them the entire corps of servants and leaving the children by themselves. The children split into mutinous factions; the fence comes down; the natives--many of whom work in the Ventura mine--enter, the cousins' incestuous behavior flourishes, two of the cousins make off across the plains with the family gold. A year goes by in the park within that one larger day. The thistles go to seed and the cousins survive by staying huddled closed to the ground, according to native custom. Then the adults return, having passed...
...ironic, it leaves readers with hardly any place to stand. Events in A House in the Country are not only bizarre but vertiginous, a maelstrom around negation. Suppose, the novel demands, that one summer the elder Venturas decide to spend a day away from their estate at a picnic site that may or may not exist. They take all their servants and weapons with them (cannibals are said to maraud in the wilds, although no living family member can testify to having seen one), leaving their 33 pampered children alone and unprotected in the huge house...
...doctors who performed the operation--including Collins, Mudge, Professor of Surgery Lawrence H. Cohn, and Dr. Robert J. Shemin--all participated in last week's transplant. Shemin transported the donor heart from Worcester in the same picnic cooler used last week to carry Boucher's new organ...
...explains that instead of people seeking a "mythical wilderness experience of early 19th century America, lots of people are just coming to picnic." The physical and managerial response of the park service is not clear--either they accomodate the changes or limit people's activities because Yosemite is a preserve of national importance...