Word: undergrowth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seems almost natural when a 2,500-lb. bull rhinoceros crashes out of the undergrowth in a full thundering charge. "Here, Macho," Bentsen calls. "How 'bout an apple for breakfast?" The massive beast puts on the brakes just short of a six-bar iron fence that separates man and animal. With a deft twist of his heavy, pointed lips, Macho plucks a slice of apple from Bentsen's hand. Bentsen reaches through the bars to scratch the leathery muzzle. Rhinos are slow-witted, almost childlike creatures that when startled tend to charge first and ask questions later. But once...
...used to be like. Old logging roads lace through this damp, shaded museum tract. Huge stumps rot here and there among the living trees. These are significant: it is obvious that a sizable number of trees can be cut without killing the forest. Saplings and a complex tangle of undergrowth spring up to use the sunlight...
...species that had no commercial value as well as the highly prized Douglas fir, seemed too inefficient to the Government foresters. Now, perhaps too late, research has shown that clear-cuts tend to break an important ecological chain: they destroy the habitat of small mammals that shelter in forest undergrowth. These creatures eat and distribute mycorrhizal fungi, which grow among the rootlets of saplings and help the trees absorb water and nutrients. There may be enough spores of fungi in the soil after a clear-cut to start a second-growth forest, but a third crop is less likely...
Great ideas, even when they seem to come all at once, actually emerge from a tangled undergrowth. Siegel, a scrawny, bespectacled teenager who was then drifting through Cleveland's Glenville High School, worked as a delivery boy for $4 a week, gave part of the money to help support his impoverished family and invested much of the rest in the adventures of Tarzan, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Imitating and burlesquing such heroes, he began concocting science-fiction tales that he mimeographed and sold to other students. One of Siegel's lesser creations was a story called The Reign...
Gold light slants through tall trees and casts long shadows across the tufted stalks of elephant grass as we arrive at the crash site in the late afternoon. Suddenly, the dense undergrowth gives way to an unnatural clearing of dirty gray sand littered with the half-recognizable detritus of the shattered gunship: broken wheel struts, a bent propeller blade, rusted armor plating, scraps of the fuselage. Resembling patches of smudged snow, remnants of the plane's once white fiber-glass insulating material are scattered everywhere. Earlier, crews of olive-clad Laotian soldiers and Americans in T shirts and grimy Levi...