Word: rusting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...forget his shabbiness with genteel pretence. The Crump children often got no firecrackers for Christmas; they were urged instead to pop dried, inflated pig bladders saved from the autumn slaughtering. Their one-room school was never painted-elders murmured evasively that they were waiting for the nailheads to rust. But even as a skinny, redheaded boy, Ed Crump stared at the world with the discerning eyes of a realist...
...next few weeks 6,000 huskies, sent out by lumber companies and forestry services, will take to the woods, armed for total war. The enemy: white pine blister rust, an incurable fungus infection that is spreading like a blitzkrieg...
...Blister rust got its beachhead in the U.S. in 1898, in a shipment of infected white pine striplings from Europe. By the time it was discovered (1906), it had rotted many a noble white pine in the Northeast, and was well started on the path that in 1922 brought it into the great forests of the Northwest...
...Blister rust symptoms: a circular, yellowish-orange patch or canker, ¼ in. in diameter, appears in the familiar fine-needle cluster of the white pine. The canker matures, in two to four years, into a festering blister, outlined by bile-green and pale yellow rings, exuding small drops of a yellow, poisonous fluid. Wherever this poison touches the bark, black or dark red scars appear. The following year these scars develop into new, white blisters, crammed with spores which the wind carries away for further propagation. The canker grows until the branch, and eventually the tree, sickens and dies...
...Blister rust cannot live on pine alone. The spores which leave the pine must find a temporary resting place on the leaves of currant or gooseberry bushes. There they develop as parasitic growths which generate a new and different generation of windborne spores which, in turn, infect the pines. These bushes are the chief points of attack for the conservation army. Once the host is destroyed, blister rust must ultimately...