Word: soiling
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...Midwest, temperatures were normal, but precipitation was not. The drought that plagued crops all last year is continuing, with little snow on the ground and low moisture content in the soil. Winter wheat needs the snow both for protection from cold and, come the spring thaw, for water. Even the Mississippi is hitting new low-water marks. The Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg has dredged the river at 18 locations this month. Still the river banks south of Memphis are a graveyard of grounded barges, and captains are lightening their loads by as much as a third to avoid...
...WORKS because Doig manages to compress meaning into the details of the natural surroundings. Rooted in the soil, always sensitive to weather and view, Doig evokes the Northwest with such an intimate touch that we actually re-experience it. His words and thoughts are religiously down to earth. Nothing can be understood without knowing the land, hugging it, runnings one's fingers over it, as he does at the end when he locates a swan and the initials "JGS" which his "winter brother" had carved in the sandstone at Neah Bay. If he reads Swan's dairy about the place...
Ciskei is an even less likely candidate for self-reliance. Its barren, eroded soil supports few crops or even trees. The pastoral people subsist on beans, maize, goats and a few dairy cattle. A drought last summer was so severe that it took $9.28 million in emergency aid from Pretoria to avert mass starvation. Though the territory is already densely populated, the government, under a "resettlement" program, sends in truckloads of unwanted blacks from urban areas. Once in Ciskei, many of the new arrivals live in stark tent towns with no schools, shops or running water...
After houses come gardens. A big house is one way to establish Paradise, but a garden, historically, is a more appropriate place to start. The childish "What if that envisions a mansion is not nearly so ambitious as one that seeks to transplant cypresses from one soil to another (as Hearst did in San Simeon) or to display the rarest species. (After seeing Lionel Rothschild's Japanese garden in London, the Japanese Ambassador was said to remark: "We have nothing like this in Japan.") Versailles, the model of gardening for so many big spenders, must have had Eden...
...Comptroller General has cited half a dozen harmful substances detected in unusual quantities in super-sealed buildings. Among them: carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, both byproducts of smoking, gas stoves and leaky furnaces; the radioactive gas radon, which results from the natural decay of radium, an element found in soil, rocks and other building materials; and numerous particles of dust, soot and asbestos...