 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! 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. 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. 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. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. 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. 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. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties.
 The Cross-Canada Throughway
 The Cross-Canada Throughway  Traveling ashore to Newport  Traveling to the Oklahoma Oil Company  Traveling through the fringe of Kansas