Word: upstream
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...began to burn off the morning mist, and accompanied by the sounds of the waking villages, the pilot switched on the engines and we moved upstream once again. All along the banks, river residents started on their morning chores, washing clothes, dishes and themselves. I saw that the docks were extensions of the houses they served. Men sat out in the sun reading the paper, while women nursed babies in the cool morning air. Koong, one of the friendliest of the four crew members, watched the waking river for a while and asked me how I was enjoying the trip...
...turned the fertile delta into desert in a few decades. The Aral Sea split into two and receded to less than half its size. Rains failed. Without the sea, temperatures became erratic. What water remained was a concentrated cocktail of salt, minerals and pesticide runoff from the cotton fields upstream. Moynaq, the nearest town, watched its livelihood drain away with the parting Aral. The former bustling port used to can 70 million tins of fish a year and import millions of tons of grain and coal. Now Moynaq's fleet lies beached in the desert just outside town...
...washed away. Looking at the larch-wood coffins that Chen keeps with fatalistic practicality by his family's beds, one suspects that Chen hopes he, his wife and 94-year-old mother will have slipped off by then. Chen, now retired, is one of the trackers who dragged boats upstream through the Gorges in the days before motor transport became standard. Although trackers haven't worked the Yangtze for more than a decade, they are immortalized in legend and song, and by authors in the West such as John Hersey and Paul Theroux. We have come to Chen's home...
...Chen, who is tight-lipped about this coming progress. "If you think the dam is bad," he says, "best you don't say anything at all." He's far more voluble about the old path, which will also be submerged, and the way he used to drag the boats upstream. "If the current was strong, the lead man would go forward and put a hook in a stone," he says, "and then all 20 or 30 of us would drive forward at once...
...Harvard varsity boat (6-1) raced the four-mile upstream course in the sixth- fastest time in the history of the regatta and the fourth-fastest time upstream...