Word: sled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...standard place to meander is along the Charles, where you can find joggers 24 hours a day. Be careful about walking alone late at night, though. In winter you can "tray" (sled on the Union's meal trays) on Weeks Bridge. In the spring one sophomore sat underneath the bridge every morning to feed the ducks. Just beyond the bridge lies the prettiest of all Harvard campuses--the Business School. You can marvel at the myopia of the B-School students, who look singularly homogeneous with their briefcases and harried faces. They never seem to notice what a delightful place...
...gray morning in January my baby girl sled into this far-fetched world. No doctors, nurses, hospitals, Representatives of Civilization to take her away and sanitize her, stop me from holding her all wet and hot and squiggly, washing her myself, nesting, bonding. I could look out my window and see the sentinel mahogany gums. They were blue-green, and their branches swam in the clean wind. I didn't want to be anywhere else...
...throughout by memorable set-pieces. At one vodka-high point, captive Russian tourists and a bunch of Yale alumni swap song for song, while American wives instruct their captors in the Hustle. In another, bone-weary Alyosha beds a beautiful Intourist guide in Czarina Elizabeth I's Petersburg sled. Outside, in tune to the jouncing springs, a group of toasting Russians rhythmically applauds the lovers' vigor. For such flamboyant scenes and scenery, the saline Salt Mine deserves an ovation...
Playwright Tally's approach is chronological and documentary, but he never gets icebound by his research. A back cloth of ghostly white covers the entire rear wall, and the floor has a bleak, blinding pallor. The sled carrying supplies and scientific instruments is a gray oblong mass to be pushed and pulled by the men like a cursed rock of Sisyphus...
...carefully provides the dimensions of the Yukon River cabins he visits, often numbering and describing the items of furniture in them. He lists some 30 uses that Alaskans have found for 55-gal. drums, describes how contemporary miners pan for gold and tells how to operate a dog sled up a hill. The dozens of Alaskans he sought out and listened to come trailing clouds of particulars. McPhee can capture a character with the economy of a good short story writer: "Harry is the kind of man who shakes Tabasco on his beans...