大学英语精读听力第四册 unit9

[00:00.00]Unit Nine  Text
[00:15.05]In 1976,during America's bicetennial celebration,
[00:19.98]a family decided to travel to the American West
[00:23.12]instead of joining the majority of people that were celebrating on the East Coast.
[00:27.77]They wanted to follow the trails that the pioneers had made
[00:31.71]when they began to settle the West.
[00:34.06]The family was looking forward to making their own discoveries.
[00:38.16]JOURNEY WEST Jim Doherty
[00:41.35]We began our trip out West on June 19,1976,
[00:46.92]a time when millions of other American families
[00:49.89]were preparing to crowd into the Bicentennial shrines of the East.
[00:53.76]We sized up America's 200th birthday celebration a bit differently.
[00:58.64]Although the Republic may have been born in the East,
[01:01.73]it had spent most of its time and energies since then moving west.
[01:05.88]So we resolved to head in the same direction in 1976,
[01:10.32]following the old pioneer trails and the famous rivers.
[01:14.45]Concentrating primarily on Wyoming and Montana,
[01:17.69]we would explore such legendary mountain ranges as the Big Horns,
[01:21.53]the Bitterroots and the Swan.
[01:23.80]There was one problem though.
[01:26.07]I was sure our four kids--educated about the West through the movies--
[01:30.54]would be disappointed.
[01:30.59]As an environmental editor,
[01:32.73]I knew that strip mining was tearing up many scenic areas
[01:36.29]and that clear-cutting was causing widespread damage in the mountains.
[01:39.79]I was well aware that draining and damming
[01:42.79]were making a mess of many rivers and wetlands.
[01:45.12]The grasslands were overgrazed and coal-burning power plants were befouling the air.
[01:50.79]Wildlife was on the run everywhere
[01:53.55]and tourists were turning the national parks into slums.
[01:56.90]I was prepared for the worst.
[01:58.75]But how to prepare the kids?
[02:01.00]The answer,we decided,
[02:03.09]was to undertake our journey not just as tourists on a holiday,
[02:06.90]but as reporters on the trail of "the real West."
[02:10.56]So all of us,from my kids to my wife,
[02:13.41]pledged to do our homework before we left and to record on the way everything we did,
[02:18.55]saw,heard,felt or thought.
[02:21.61]Predictably, we did not uncover any new truths about the West in three short weeks.
[02:28.06]But there were plenty of surprises on that 5,200-mile journey
[02:32.53]and the biggest one was this: I had been wrong.
[02:35.87]Some of the troubles we saw were every bit as bad as I had dreaded.
[02:40.03]But by and large,the country was as glorious,
[02:42.98]as vast and as overwhelmingly spectacular
[02:45.93]as those know-nothing kids had expected!
[02:48.67]Half the fun of going west is discovering,along the way,
[02:52.46]how much the past is still with us.
[02:54.89]Old wives's tales.
[02:55.00]Little old farm towns shaded from the summer heat by enormous maple trees on streets.
[03:00.51]White-haired folks reading the paper on their farmhouse porches at sunset.
[03:05.16]Worn-out windmills standing alone in pastures...All in all,
[03:05.23]we did not see much evidence that smalltown America is vanishing
[03:09.02]as we traveled through rural Wisconsin,Minnesota and South Dakota.
[03:13.51]It's true that many new homes are rising in many old cornfields.
[03:18.11]But for the most part,
[03:19.21]life in vast areas of the American heartland remains
[03:22.55]pretty much the same as it was 30 and 40 years ago.
[03:26.10]In the hilly farmlands of southern Wisconsin and Minnesota,
[03:30.05]we found the fields and forests green and the creeks still flowing.
[03:33.97]The farms,with their "eggs for sale"signs
[03:37.81]and enormous "grandma's gardens"in the front yards,looked prosperous and secure.
[03:43.16]Not much further north,though,a drought was threatening the land.
[03:47.73]In South Dakota, the situation was far worse.
[03:51.52]"Haven't seen anything like this since the dirty thirties,"one farmer told us.
[03:56.20]Even in nomal times,most of South Dakota is dry.
[04:00.09]Now it was being burned to a crisp.
[04:02.91]The water holes were dried up
[04:05.37]and we saw dead cattle lying here and there in the treeless,rolling range.
[04:09.73]Some farmers were hauling water out to their thirsty stock daily;
[04:13.99]other were trying to drill deep wells.
[04:16.73]We saw two distinctly different Wyomings
[04:19.81]We crossed the first Wyoming between the Black Hills and the Big Horns.
[04:24.10]Wide-open grass land,fenced and colorless,
[04:27.26]with red rocks and sweet-smelling shrubs scattered about,
[04:30.70]it was typical of a hard-used land.
[04:33.32]Cattle grazed on it.
[04:33.42]Oil rigs pumped on it and power lines zigzagged all over it.
[04:37.79]Freight trains labored across it,hauling coal from strip mine to power plant,
[04:42.67]hauling uranium and other minerals to refineries.
[04:46.04]This Wyoming,clearly,was booming.
[04:48.50]The other Wyoming started some miles east of Buffalo,
[04:48.57]an unexpectedly graceful community in the foothills of the Big Horns.
[04:52.83]On one side of town,antelope abounded by fours and fives in the hills,
[04:57.40]and yellow wild flowers lined the roads.
[05:00.40]On the other side rose the Big horns and nearly 10,000 feet up,
[05:04.40]Powder River Pass cut through them.
[05:06.67]The Big Horn canyons were incredible,
[05:09.41]with four and five distinct layers of pine trees somehow clinging to the steep,rochy walls.
[05:15.87]Far,far below,Ten Sleep Creek was a thin,white torrent on the rampage.
[05:21.93]In some of the less wild terrain,we saw deer on the high green hillsides and,
[05:27.91]as we climbed up toward our picnic spot,we flushed two does and two fawns.
[05:27.96]That night,we fell asleep with the roar of Ten Sleep in our ears.
[05:32.43]We had picked by chance for our stopping place an area rich in western lore.
[05:38.25]At one time,Ten Sleep--a small village at the western base of the Big Horns--
[05:43.71]lay midway between two great Indian camps.
[05:47.08]In those days,the Indians measured distances by the number of sleeps
[05:52.26]and the halfway mark between those two camps was exactly ten sleeps.
[05:56.70]We crossed the Continental Divide for the first time on a cool morning,
[06:01.32]cutting through the Rockies in northwestern Wyoming
[06:04.09]at a place called Togwatee Pass(at a height of 9,656 feet).
[06:10.02]Our van had just leveled off and we were rounding a downhill bend when,
[06:14.38]all at once,there they were,
[06:16.65]streched out before us in aspectacular procession of massive white peaks:
[06:21.49]the Tetons My wife gasped and,behind us,the kids began to yell.
[06:27.52]In truth,it was a startling sight--a sight none of us will ever forget.
[06:32.54]We had seen mountains before,
[06:34.78]but we had never experienced anything even remotely like that initial impact of the Tetons.
[06:41.03]It was exactly what we had in mind when we decided to take our first trip "out West."