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The Cooling of America

Mud splats against wheel wells. The transmission howls. Linda Ronstadt, a half-ton Chevy pickup with a ton of yellow birch cordwood aboard, has sunk to her rusty frame in a mushy patch of logging road. Linda has four-wheel drive and a lot of heart, but this is a Sargasso of mud, the kind that bogs the wood lot every year after the leafless forest trees stop drinking water and the October rains come. Linda's friend and owner disembarks to consider the problem.

What follows is wet, dirty...

Quotes of the Day »

RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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