Word: sanding
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...Shelbyville's largest employer, with more than 800 workers. Salaries start at $16.50 an hour, and the benefits at this German company are, well, positively European. In one of its factories along the Blue River, a row of mammoth 2400° furnaces spin the plant's secret recipe of sand, soda ash, borax and limestone into billions of billowy glass fibers, which will be cooled, packed and cut into battens of fiber-glass insulation. The workers running the furnaces are the last of a dying breed: people holding good jobs who never earned a high school diploma. Thirty years...
Some places the border is a muddy river, too thin to plow, too thick to drink. Other places it's just a line in the sand. Over the years mapmakers redrew it, wars moved it, nature yanked it all around as the course of the Rio Grande shifted. But what would it take to make it disappear altogether...
...know how they got there--are growing so fast they have blocked the flow of the river. Fighting them would require approval from both sides, which is practically impossible to get. And so here, all that is left of the border is four metal stakes in the sand, tied with orange ribbons whipping in the Gulf breeze.The border patrol has had to make a little sand berm to keep the smugglers from just driving across. The Mexicans, in their dark-windowed Pontiacs, drive right up to the very stakes, and the border patrolmen in their Suburbans get out their binoculars...
...hand. Highway 4 through Brownsville ends with a stop sign that needs to be taken seriously. The asphalt turns into beach and leads straight into the sea. But turn right, and you can drive down the beach as in the old days at Daytona, on fine, hard-packed sand, hugging the Gulf of Mexico. It's a place to appreciate a pristine view--no condos, no concession stands, no concessions at all to anything except the fact that the border begins where the Rio Grande pours into the sea, and so it has to be guarded carefully...
...psychological damage to Liberia's population of 2 million cannot be fathomed. What does it do to people to walk along Monrovia's sandy beaches and have to step around skulls and rib cages that are only half submerged in the sand? Taking stock of the toll, a Monrovia cleric said simply, "I weep for this country." If only tears could start the healing...