Word: upstream
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Almost everyone has some appreciation of how water projects have altered the course of civilization in ways we (perhaps foolishly) call benign. Dams and reservoirs permit unimaginable numbers of people to inhabit forbiddingly arid regions--as well as floodplains where cities would be washed away without upstream protection. Sacramento, Calif., for example, is dryer than North Africa, but the Sacramento River, on whose banks it sits, spread 30 miles (50 km) wide during the wettest California winter on record, in 1862, before dams and levees tamed the river. Dams produce more clean energy than nuclear reactors. Irrigation agriculture, largely dependent...
While the results were perfect for Harvard, the weather was not. Rain and heavy winds forced race officials to alter the race. The morning's races were moved to an upstream course further down the river, and side-by-side competition was eliminated. Instead, the boats raced single file with crews starting about a minute apart...
...river is narrow and winding and our coxswain is constantly telling us when a buoy is coming up under our riggers, which is annoying as hell, but I guess it beats unexpectedly hitting a buoy that throws off your stroke. After launching off their wobbly plastic docks, we went upstream to the starting line doing some 20s at 3/4 pressure, 22 and 28 strokes per minute. Then we turned around and headed back down doing some 20s at 3/4 slide to get the rate up: 34, then 38. Finally a couple starting sequence pieces: five, ten, and ten strokes...
...went upstream and did some 2/3, 3/4, full pieces, 22 to 24 strokes per minute. Beat the other crew pretty solidly on the first and third, and only marginally on the second piece, although we were helped by the other boat's inexperienced coxswain, whose creative steering maneuvers included running the boat up on the sandbank between Arsenal and North Beacon on the first piece. After practice they said they heard the skeg drag along the bottom, but it stayed attached...
After more than half a decade of seemingly swimming upstream against the rest of the music world, Built to Spill have gained a reputation as the great underdog hope of American rock. They're literate without being pretentious, hard without being blunt, sensitive without being Hallmark and fiercely independent in spirit. They've finally graduated from "next big thing" purgatory and have firmly established themselves as one of the most important bands plugging their amps in today...