Word: sand
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...used to be much easier to tell which of us were nuts and which weren't. Take, for example, a recent trip to a California desert to check out a scrubby campsite in the middle of the sand trap that stretches from San Diego to Phoenix. The nowhere setting and psycho temperature, a relatively cool 112[degrees] on a recent afternoon, tells you right away that the 100 to 150 squatters parked there this summer--several thousand others always flee the heat and return in October--are whacked out of their gourd...
...Alisa's diabetes, had required numerous medical tests. And while Everett, 37, a $26,000-a-year mechanic in a local woolen mill, has health insurance, he was still responsible for almost $3,000 in unreimbursed expenses. The hospital's solution: to pay half the bill, Everett agreed to sand, repaint and refurbish hospital lawn chairs; Alisa is assembling a hospital photo album of doctors, staff and equipment to explain medical care to children who become patients. "I used to be ashamed to go to the post office and get all those hospital bills," Alisa says. "But when you give...
...SAND, SEA AND CELL PHONE...
...Sissano Lagoon, separated from the ocean by a fragile spit of sand where villages once grew, is now a place of the most primitive horrors. Limbs hang from the coconut trees, freshly tamped graves dot the beach, and huge saltwater crocodiles crawl from the red-tinged sea to scavenge on the unburied dead. Bodies swiftly rotted by the tropical heat come apart in emergency workers' hands. And to the surviving villagers, many of them amputees after gangrene invaded their wounds, it is a place to be ever forsaken, a steaming graveyard carved out by elemental demons. New villages, crude...
First, a tsunami inhales. The water that once caressed the shore is sucked away; fish flop gasping in unexpected air; harbor boats are dashed to splinters on the sudden sand. For five minutes or perhaps 30, the sea is empty as the great wave rolls in. Out in the deep it was no more than a foot high, swift and imperceptible; now, forced into standing straight by the ascending slope of the ocean floor, it is 20 feet. Or a hundred. And it will pound down on places the gentle tides have never touched...