 What is now a similar experience to what was once normal for shipping centers?
It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory.
 The Cross-Canada Throughway
 The Cross-Canada Throughway  Traveling ashore to Newport  Traveling to the Oklahoma Oil Company  Traveling through the fringe of Kansas