Word: saltbush
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Western Australia's Nullarbor (meaning no trees) Plain is an arid, limestone plateau that lies east of the old gold-rush towns of Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie, southeast of Comet Vale and northeast of Grass Patch. It is a barren, almost unpopulated land of sand and saltbush. Out of the blackness of the southwestern sky one night last week, the fringe of this isolated region was visited by a fiery symbol of the Western world's most advanced technology: the final, fatal fall of Skylab...
This ditty is recited by the children of Cook. They are up at dawn to watch the train refuel before it heads across the 500-mile plain of Nullarbor (Latin for "not any tree"). The desolate limestone plateau is covered with sea fossils, saltbush, and red-flowering wild hops. Weird subterranean winds whistle through caves honeycombing the limestone, and whoosh with an eerie trumpeting from gaping blowholes. Over one stretch known as "the long straight," the track runs dead ahead for 297 miles, the longest straightway railroad in the world. There was a "loco" driver at Cook named Kevin Smith...
...loco driver boarding at Cook is Gary Carn He and his fireman, Peter Read, carry four days' provisions in a metal tucker box, which they keep in the locomotive cab. Carn stares down the twin ribbons of steel at a sea of green saltbush that reaches out in every direction to the circular horizon. No houses, no trees; only telephone poles rushing by at 60 m.p.h. interrupt his view. "We used to stop and let the passengers pick wildflowers," Carn says. "There are 7,000 different kinds...
...biggest U.S. project is the $1,800,000 grasslands study, which has 80 scientists working in 400 counties between the Mississippi and the Rockies. Besides trailing antelopes, they are studying such seeming minutiae as the relationship between cows and lark buntings. The little birds nest on the range in saltbush, a plant that cows find delectable. As the supply of saltbush is eaten, the lark bunting population declines. Without the birds to eat grasshoppers, the insects begin to proliferate and compete with cows for grass. In the end, the cows' survival is at stake. With basic information about...