the dukan diet while breastfeeding



>> the following presentation is presented by read north dakota and by the members of the public broadcast system. born in north dakota he is the author of eight novels, a book of poetry entitled even tide and essays that have appeared in numerous publications.

the memoir what i think i did is his 6th book noted as a notable book of the year by thenew york times book review. today he and his family live in north dakota where heraises registered quarter horses. we invite you to spend an evening with the best selling author, larry.

i am thinking of those i love both living and dead. . >> filled with apathy, ambition, self indulgence, and all of their accusations just and there is no hope of rest. i try then toretrace the series. it is an unpaved street.

it is the color of my hand. it is made up mostly of the clay gumbo from the flattened village so small it can be seen through from all sides. and it is on greated surface generally overrun, with a spring, iron-like in summer. furred in fall with mountainy

ridges of the moon. and in winter, buried belowwith ice-covered snow. it is the main street of hyatt, north dakota, and it is one block long. i lived in hyatt from the time i was born until i was six and returned only onceat the age of eight. wearing a plaid jacket exactly

like my father's and ran up and down the street between buildings that stand deserted now that time has had its diminishing effect. rick motts, let'sgive him a big hand. [ applause ] thank you all for being here. i moved back to north dakota,

i should say, in 1978. i was born in caring ton so i'm a native and actually i'm the fifth generation of family to live in this state. my great and great grandfather homesteaded in richland county in 1881 in dakota territory before north dakota was a state.

and then the family seemedto keep tending west. my grandfather lived around courtney wimbledon and then my father after he went to jamestown college he finished up his degree at valley city and then he moves to sikeston which is where i grew up. he was the high school teacher,

principal, superintendent in sikeston for 12 years. i moved back and my neighbor tion i moved back to western north dakota because that's the part ofthe state i particularly like the most with all of the pheasants and the nice things that northdakota has to offer and i moved back and my neighbor said, well, what do you do?

i said, well, i'm a writer. and they thought that wasa perfectly respectable occupation for out there in west river country being a rodeo rider. i said writer and then they kind of, well, whatdo writers do? well, they write books andactually i became very friendly with my neighborsonce they saw me working in

the fields and making hay just as they did and doing the things that they did, i was accepted into their community. in the local community i don't know, i don't know i happened to be teaching a course in western classics at jamestown college right now and we just

studied the ilead and we are finishing up the odyssey and we are finishing up with a word that is sort of likell of you greek scholars can make fun of me, but the important thing is the xen at the beginning means strangeror the root of stranger, foreigner, and that's where we

get our word xenophobia which means fear of the foreigner or fear of the stranger. i don't know. i think i kind of felt that sometimes in north dakota. somebody who moved here from another state said when you went to small towns he felt

riveted by the dakota stare. i said what's that? he said, well, you walk through town and everybody is -- and the other day i was in town and somebody said you are that wywoodie and you just moved in there, and isaid, well, 30 years ago. he said that's what i mean.

so it takes a few generations i think in some of our communities until we aremade to feel at home. i'm going to be reading from the book that reed, north dakota has kindly chosen as the memoir to be read this year and i've done memoir workshops this summer and we

did a question answer video teleconferencing with high school students and now i'm going to read a bit from this memoir we've been talking about all of these months. and first people say what is a meoir, what does that mean? and here's how i tried to

define it when iwrote this book. memory isn't a pilot but a back seat driverwho wants control. story is the pilot and we follow its course through the present hearing memoriesnagging knowledge of the weathers and roadblocksof the past. memory's name is to be there, leap the present, persuade us

the past is identical to the future, prophetic, ourone seat of reference. those blank spaces,we slip from defined. we've been suspendedin the past. that suspension,is memory's power. memory is imagination. it holds a lifetime store of every angle and declination of experience and sensation and

in fact we know besides its tinting of all of those and what we call a memoir is an attempt to tame memoriestakeovers into paths. we tip-toe down toward truth. there are many things from this memoir set because of the worst weather ever recorded in north dakota history '96, '97

when the great flood swept through different parts of the state, i remembered a day before the big flood in grand porks seven houses in mott washed away and that was small potatoes or whatever happened in grand forks but it didn'treally make the news but we did have that kind ofsevere weather there, too.

i remember i was listeningto the radio one day and the announcer got real excited about how cold it was and how much snow there was and he said this is the worst weather that's been recorded in north dakota in 250 years. wait a minute, the state is only about a hundred years old.

maybe they had buffalo count, but otherwise i don'tknow how he would know. there are many things i would read about tonight but i thought i want to read about my children, because they shaped my life. at different times they guided me and helped me become who i

am and opened my mind to different ideas and helping me see things in different waysbesides all of the sports you have to learn, you know? just thinking about it tires me out now tonight. but before i do that i'm going to mention the biggest effect on me before i became a father

to my children, and it happens during this winterand here we go. today in the temporal present where i capped this together from drafts and notes, aroad roadblock arrived. a trip tick of my family, a studio photographer'spaper board fold-out. you have seen those they fold out in three pieces taken two

years before we movedfrom north dakota. my mother and father both up in the center scene, her lips pursed and her bodyheavy with nursing. one t of my father'sname clipped. my brother, dan in the panel to the left with his arm around mary lois,the nursing baby. both of their eyes wide, my

younger brother charles and i on the right smiling like cats in a fish store. this has come from a nun on an afternoon when i stopped in my pickup on the mailbox on the way to the bank pulling book envelopes and letters in through its window.

my mother is cleaning and hoping to get rid ofsome things, she writes. and i know her parents were family friends during our last years in sikeston, the god godparents of mary lois and i laid the picture which i hadseen before i have a copy on the seat beside my gloves and open a newspaper clippingthat has fluttered from it.

there in news print i read thursday, march 15, 1951, above a column titled siketon and then below in smaller bold type last week's news, this. just received the obituary on january 19 she was taken ill and upon arrival at the hospital in a nearby town her

unborn baby was announced dead. she gained strength rapidly and by the third day her pulseand temperature were normal and she was feeling very well. on the fourth day the doctor became concerned about herkidneys but they didn't think there was immediate danger. from then on she apparently improved and when her husband

visited her on january 25th she seemed very well and talked a good deal and before he left the doctors insured him he was better and therewas nothing to fear. her kidneys having improved and temperatureand pulse normal. at 10:30 he was called back to the hospital she havingbecome very ill.

besides the three doctors already there, threemore were called. they recommended taking herto the methodist hospital in peoria where there was one of the very few mechanical kidneys. the next morning she beganresponding again and by january 28th her condition was much better and at that time she seemed to recognizethings going on.

she seemed to be holding her own and her pulse remainedgood until 2:30 p.m.. january 30th she very suddenly passed away then before her mother and an aunt who were in the hospital couldget up on floor. that's all i read. i pull off down the road angry that this is the first i've

heard of this that i've waited this long to discover it when at the time 50 years ago i had to piece together a story with details i overheard or saw, some of it as slipperyas if slick with blood. before i get to the blacktop a reaction like a cough comes and then tears spatter my

jacket and i grieve for her all over again to misty winter countryside a white swim i success with sea waterdown my throat. >> it is the original quarter that the burn -- bernfamily homesteaded in 1917. they are the only family that has lived here before us. and at a certain point in our

lives we lived in the east, we lived in spots all through the midwest, but we decided we really wanted to live in the west and my wife is from oregon so we spent a month going through the westernstates and on the way we stopped to see my uncle. at white earth northdakota at the rodeo.

we were living in chicago then when we got back i said where did you feel was most the west? we were in montana, utah, wyoming and mexico and she said those days wespent with our uncle. because there was something very pristine and unlike the rest of the united states righthere in western north dakota.

it was two summers ago now when i was out baling hay and i was wearing a loose jacket which i shouldn't have been. i should have at least had it buttoned up and it was real windy that day and i picked up rocks and i was putting them on the tractor and the flap of

it blew up and grabbed ahold and when i woke up i couldbarely breathe or move. a few broken ribs and some compression fractures in my spine and just my head banged up and nerve damageacross my back. do you want anything else? no. anyway, nobody came and in my

neighbor who was combining here i grow up, i drove unand checked his whole combine over and then left for lunch. it was so windy no matter how much i yelled nobodycould hear me. finally i realized, youknow, nobody is coming. nobody can hear you for whatever reason soyou are on your own.

then i remembered i had apocketknife in my jacket pocket here, but this whole arm was caught in pto and i pulled way up so i couldn't quite, i couldn't get myleft hand in that pocket. i had to ease the knife out with my fingertips up to the top of the pocketwhere it slipped. i could not and i knew i could

never reach the ground but somehow i got my legs together quick enough and i was able to flip this hand, too,and catch it. then using that it took about a hour and a half to cut myself to remove all of the twisted up material thatwas holding me there. but i did, you know, andthese things can happen to a

neighbor and if say the wifeor child is present does not handle them theygive you a call. you never know. you never know how here. it is really, as i say in my memoir, every day is a step from death. >> i'm going to read from thatmemoir a little later, too, but i want to continue with

what i said i was going to do which is read about my children. i'm going to go inchronological order though that's not the chronologicalorder of the book and some people wonder if there is achronological order of the book. one of the students the other day asked me what was the point, what point did you have in mind when you wrote this?

i said oh, i just kind of wanted to wander around in my mind for a while, i guess. i wake thinking of ourdaughter, newland. she was our only child for nine years so close to me and my wife when we were young still developing as it seems in the memory of half sleep it

is difficult to set her at arm's length as itwere for clear look. she is an essential extension of me separate yet not, sending up heat likea second conscience. i can't make out why this is, except i recognize she is upset. her face that is her mother's drawn by a gravity of

emotional weight like grief. i drift to the year she was 12 then five then when she was 2. her calm, but ardent nature with a risk in her look that catches the attention of others. it is unblinking openness. the tie to what enduresbetween my wife and me. she walks or runs from one to

the other as if to perfect a wave she senses orto draw it tighter. a duty i full act of a duty iful only and oldest child. the the fall when she is three my wife returns from the store with her and puts a package of corn on the cob into the refrigerator when her arms fly

out from her snow suit and she cries, no, no, no, corn, no. my wife usually summons concern for others and now she asks what it is our daughter wants and tries to understand then closes the refrigerator door and its pneumatic thuning seems the end of things.

she pitches over backwards, kicking the floor with her heels wailing and my wife turns to me astonishedas if i knew the cause. then i'm ashamed to saythis, we both laugh. we can't help it sometimes. or smile at this overwrought reaction entirely new in our daughter while shekeeps wailing.

tears of hurt spill into and over the blondecurls in her hood. my wife goes down on her honches in a mother's move of rescue and with that, the entire scene turns yellow. the corn on the cob, my wife's yellow blonde air, newland's snow suit and curls and then i

hold my breath until blue streaks across the yellow and newland comes climbing through the blaze in a heated clam or as my heart knocks, herknocking for entry. she enters the accelerating thought of it and then the airy bubbles of oxygenof life continuing. in their run.

we were that close. i'm going to read now from something that the fall of that worst winter i decided,hey, let's install a wood-burning furnace. then the winter came. so we not only had to keep the furnace going, we hadto cut wood for it. so i'm going to read a little

piece about that. actually i want to give a little bit ofintroduction to it. we planted thousands oftrees since we arrived. and we'll plant more, i presume, and not out of guilt. the rolling plain scraped lean is all but treeless, every planting helps hold soil and

adds to the wildlife habitat. across the landscape trees lie where they fall and half mile tree rows planted asshelter belts go dead. the trees around our farmstead were put in 60 years ago during the dust bowl days of the 30s and most of them chinese elm and stunted ash

are slowly in someinstances rapidly dying. what do you do with a dead tree? dump it in a poisonous landfill? we cremate them for the heat. it is time, dad, joseph says, we drive in our green pickup to the rows of cottonwood where we have been cutting wood and i open the barbed

wire gate, glittersof frost on each bar. an owl falls from a highwindow in the last of an abandoned farm and pumps its wings almost to touching once, twice, enough to glide over a hill in the se credit silence of the snow. joseph fills the chainsaw with gas and i say let's cut until

the tank runs dryand call it a day. all right. did you see the owl? no, i was thinking. which occupies him entirely just concentrationof a 19-year-old. what? what were you thinking? why it is i don't like winter

the way i used to. because of all of the wood we have to cut i say and notice how the snow has ridges as thick as the limbs themselves. i mean the snow, he says. well, that's probably because of this awful winter. probably. he starts to sawhis turn for this.

our meditative silence shattered and soon the two of us are working as one while darkness swings downon us at 4:00 p.m.. as swiftly as the swoop of that silent owl. now, the next child as we move down the line would be a daughter named ruth and ruth

you will hear about next ruth was so energized, active and talkative it was difficult for us to keep up with her. joseph had his stable of metal toys inherited from cousin and one a bull dois -- bull doser minus its tread and scoop. ruth claimed she would run

this bull doser up and down the sidewalks and around back and take the branch from the steps back to where i work and she ran it so wildly in a crouch leaning her weight on it the bare wheels sparking on the cement i wasafraid she would fall. bull-doze she cried when i asked herto slow it down but she couldn't.

its speed was exactly hers. had she got on the swing set she pumped herself as high as the swing went without wrapping or dropping her off upside down and would have tipped the metal frame ifwe hadn't embedded it in concrete. as it was it caused it to give

and rock so muchshe loosened it. monkey bars ran across the top and from the time she was four she ran across theseand said, dad, watch. how strong she was. strong as a boy. hair flying, scandinavian blonde, her hair, so thinduring her first year i cradled her head against my

chest with one hand, the other over it to shelter it from people that said,a boy or baldy. oh, like that singing swan when it came in, fine andblonde, white blonde and platinum. at the time i felt she wasn't receiving the attention she should because joseph our only

son was three when she was born. drawing me his way when she needed a father's hand then at 2:00 laurel arrived. ruth when she was a year old called her source of food, she was being breast fed, norsers. already inclining toward horses. at two she told a visitor,

cody pokey, sizing up our herd. my wife and i used to take rests together the only time we had alone with three children that close striving against the limitations of days and their agesand the urge to grow. one afternoon when i was away, with carol in the house, ruth

ran in crying saying she fell from the monkey barsand hurt her arm. she was five and my wife thought she had fallen on the branch that was stickingout of her arm. that was her bone. once it was reset surgically and put in a cast my concern for her turned to empathy

because i once wore a cast and partly understood how she must feel and it was then i started our talks as i called them. i would hold her on a knee and speak close to her ear in a rapid rush to be one with her and learn by this exactly how fast it was she talked.

she was our historian we said. if anybody asked a question she answered it in entirehonesty with none of the social sir come --cimcumspection and continued down other avenues until shewas giving the details of all that happened in our household for weeks, including thedisputes and other worse embarrassments. she needed to preserve moments

with a photographic integrity or better laced through or networks of language from the stories she composed when she must have been busier than we knew. she had a gift with horses an inner sense of their nature. i'm part horse, she said.

and got their attention right off and held itthrough the moves. she imprinted. so we sent her to trainers who also saw the gift and this winter she has been riding every day when it is not 30 below. bundled up her lightcomplection crimson in the

cold, and her scandinavian friendlyness and interest in others and all sorts of people there isn't a hint ofdissentiphobia of our german background and what we sometimes sense in local town folk, descentiphobiais too much. not so much fear of strangers as lack of charity forthose you can't classify.

that's the only bad thing i'm going to say tonight, okay? i just had to get it out. but it is throughmy daughter ruth. i see we're moving right along. i'm going to read now about my youngest daughter. as you figured out we have three daughters and a son.her name is laurel.

laurel is in the car with me alone one of the few occasions iremember being alone with her. she is usually with her mother who is off with hermother in arizona. we were on the way to bismarck to a chapel inside a care center i have been asked to exort, what happens when a person who is not a pastor or

teaching elder isasked to speak. we're early so laurel and i set up chairs in the room that has the feel of a funeral parlor and the floating fear i feel when i am the one that looks for the others as the word blooms under my stomach and then a young couple with

four children a number i'm used to with our four, walks in. the first two arrive. the handsome woman cradles a child in one armand leads another. her husband hastwins in his hands. and before they reach us, the woman starts talking about an article, an airlines magazineabout the bad lands.

they had to fly east for a family funeral she says and pulled a magazine from a seat pocket while in flight and out of the blue she has to smile at this, she found my article about the bad lands of north dakota the coincidence of that considering their journey

helped settle them she says. now just back and here you are. i believe so. they are attentive, gracious, the kind of couple the people in the city wouldcall beautiful. but it is hard to receive what they say through my state and finally i turn sensing my

daughter at my backa close follower. my height already at 15 years. actually if you met laurel, no. the geneal young man in the double breasted suit with a chest of a weight lifterreaches out to shake. laurel, in a reserved version of her several social smiles, scarcely shows her teeth and

then gingerly extends a hand. no, we haven't, he adds taking her hand in both of his as he studies her, but i sure see she is your daughter. those are your eyes. an odd way to put it, i think. then laurel and i turn our heads at a questioning angle

as if we are looking over a window sill from opposite sides or better into a mirror and nobody has mentioned the similarity before and our eyes jerk to take this in and then hers soften the bright blue of the sky and i feel a salt sting with a glimpse of how

hers will run when she looks at me in a casket awaited intuition that arriveswith a shock. no pitty or morbidintraspection but a death of coolness as in death itself and then i want to comfort her in a state i neverwould have imagined. she returns my stare politely smiling as if to view her eyes

and a delicate tenderness registers the essence ofher first inkling of it. she often keeps others ata distance with her tart come-backs breath-taking in their cutting precisionsince she was six. but that's been giving way as i have mentioned to her in recent talks hoping to draw this new nature in her, this

beautiful gentle tenderness. turning to the couple, because i withdrew from laurel when she was five in reaction my wife was spending hours with her in the bedroom at night reading and holding her in her lap as if our last child were a lifeline to a better self.

yes, i say to what i've heard whatever it was confused, caught in my cold-heartedwithdrawal from laurel. she was so intelligent that as the two-year-old she had to have books in her crib to fall asleep and how this manifested itself even physically when she was four and i cut her

hair, thick and heavy as hemp and saw it drop all over her head in ringlets, springy curls, not one strand of that now as if the dimensions of her intelligence hadat last been freed. and now oh, lord, register as tender admiration this lovely woman willing to be happy with

mere crumbs of affection that fall from me out of a love that in my carelessness i have all but turned aside. >> what advice can you offer me to become an aspiring author? >> okay. what advice can i give to young writers, there aretwo things i usually say.

the first is you haveto write every day. because anyone who becomes a writer or who is going to make a living at it or somewhat of a living has to write every day. you can't wait for inspiration. as another writer says iget inspired every day. this is william faulkner. i get inspired every day

because i write every day. in other words, inspirationrises out of the work. so you have to be used to working and you haveto work hard at it. the second thing i usually say is don't do it unless you feel called. because it can be arough road at times. dealing with the internal life

and public reaction to something you have spent day five or six or seven or eight or ten years to write. does that answer your question? it was a good question. both of them were, thank you. >> this is from one of the question/answer sessions of

the man in high school and i have to say that i didn't think i have encountered such a lively and intelligent bunch of high school students as i did that day both at mandana and bismarck century high schools and then there were hook-ups to moore and fargo.

it was astonishing and toward the end i asked how many here would like to write or thought of writing and almost all of them raised their hand. this is astonishing. i feel something ishappening in north dakota. i believe that the idea of read north dakota is spreading

the interconnectionsthat we need here. just imagine if only say200,000 people were interconnected with the arts that would be one-thirdof our population. what a network that would be. when you think of new york city even with 11 million people what couldbe happening here? it is astonishing and i'm

seeing the first signsof it, i believe. i also have a comp 101 class, the liveliest class i've had. it is wonderful. i encourage all of you young people here to keep it up. keep reading and writing. and fantastic things are goingto happen in this state. north dakota is a state of art.

it is a beautiful state. there is no state like it. even the way farmers plow their fields you can see the design in the landscape. the way they are intuitive enough to know that this piece of machinery needs a little extra fixing so they we would

the piece on there thatmakes them work better. that's artistic thought. that's creative thought the way they layout their buildings in a farm stead. the way some of ourtowels are laid out. all of that is artistic work. as i said i'm going to read a little bit from my new memoir which is supposed to be out this winter but i don't know.

changed publishers in themiddle of the course and somebody else bought out the publishing house i was withand i talked about the accident i had with the pto but i thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of how it felt being there throughpros, the difference between speaking and then trying to put it inprose that might make sense and this memoir is addressedto my son, joseph.

who presently is in iraq. he is a helicopter pilot. that's why i am addressing this to him so i'm trapped in there as i mentioned. by the way, i found mice in traps who were held only by a front paw dead in a hour. i guess it is panic so iknew i couldn't panic.

and as i mentioned my neighbor came and checked over hiscombine and drove away. so joseph there was nogetting my hopes up. nobody was coming. for as many reasons as this began, not to mentionthe way it will end. i had to find my own way out. i saw that as clearly as if set in print before my eyes.

this is a test. i had on thin leather riding gloves and i shook off the left one and lunged in that direction hearing with my cry the rip of the jacketbut it didn't give. i worked my left hand up inside its sleeve big enough to allow my elbow to bend but

couldn't get my arm out and i could not draw my arm out through the length of thesleeve bound as i was. with my fingertips i tugged at the jacket's armpit to get my elbow out imagining thecontortions i houdini and remembered an odd accent saying if spirit as the texts have it form the world then

spirit is to the super to it, and material reality must bow to it. so bow, i thought. and in a compression of my body i could never reproduce my arm was out ofthe sleeve free. still the twisted tight jacket binding my arm would not give

and now the arm was nearly numb from my contortions. i could breathe easier and the wind was a balm over my arm and back, my shirt damp and in tatters flapping. i said i will not give up. and in another contortion got my left hand to my right thigh

and felt a protrusion, the knife, at the bottomof my pocket. i couldn't reach far enough to get my hand in the pocket so ibegan inching the knife up my leg from the outside ignoring the numb swelling in my arm. this knife has solid stainless steel a mate to the one i gave you, joseph, with holesdrilled in its handle to

lighten it. i finally had it to the top of the pocket breathing hard, but couldn't get it dis lodgedfrom the inner corner. it was stuck there. i saw i was wearing different jeans than the perrybelieved i had on. and in the dislocation of that thought a verse people used to

suggest super human feats which may be so but in the context thewriter is explaining how he has learned to be content with every up and down he encounters whether he is full or hungry in abundance or in need and in conclusion says i can do all things through christwho strengthens me. i needed strength.

another line that keptrevolving in me over the summer as i swatted flies, fresh from the barnyard, rose in counter point we are to the gods as flies to wanton boys, they kill us for the sport. the jeans and the malignantly behind the line drivered a jolt that tripped the knife

outside the pocketshining like a star. i eased it the rest of the way out careful not to let it slip because i knew i couldn't reach the ground with my right arm strapped as i was and suffered a light-headedswim toward lights out. i got the blade out. grateful for its sharp point

and halfway back i punched through the denim and started sawing but i had to rest partly because i sawed with noloosening and i had to twist to the right to get to the side of the jacket whilethat caused more pain. i juggled the knife to get a better grip and a slow dimness saw it slip awaysliding down my lap.

a reflex i can't explain had my thighs together so fast i wasn't aware i stopped the knife with a swing ofmy numb right hand. i eased my left over to it and got a proper grip on the handle. i had to rest againsweating in the wind. and sensed a narrowingof my vision. though i can, i will notgive in, i thought.

and realized my inner speech was a form of prayer i seldom practiced not lofty pretense. i will not desert care or you, joseph or ruth ornewland or laurel, no. i redid the series of movements, beginningwith the hand. i knew was still agile in order to restore feeling to my

arm because i was readyfor my last attempt. i stood as well as i was able, bracing my feet for leverage and sawed away in a blind fever. i came to the collar of double denim and leather andcouldn't cut through it. didn't have the strength and then thought this is it. and cut around the collar not

an easy route when i reached the double thick seam at the shoulder but in a suddenness that set me off balance i was staggering away to the side hunched like a horror movie monster drooling andmoaning but free at last. free in the tearing wind. >> this memoir is called a

step from death, and now that i'm released from that position i'm going torelease you from me. and ask if rick would come here again and a little later maybe a little later, okay. a little later rick i'llrelease you in a minute. that terrible winter, we had a neighbor, we becamegood friends.

i became good friends with all of my neighbors, and hehad a terrible winter. the winter before his wife had died that terrible winter his son who is only 40 or so died and he had to go tohis son's funeral. his son was an executive with sony, first in japan. he spoke jap knees fluently.

in fact, so well they would sometimes send him over to japan to handle delicate negotiationsbecause they trusted him so much. his name was brad. i'm going to talk about this neighbor a little bit. kenny is his name, and he has asked me to come and do his chores so he can go to hisson's funeral, right?

i drove over to meet my neighbor kenny in a new way now that his son was gone anddiscovered snow piled in his yard and 12-foot mounds thefirst i've seen it so. my first trip here since winter hit and stepped into a frozen wasteland with no sound and then i hear something where his wife has died once

kept milk goats and a regular banging only a human being would make and i head toward the building and i fear, as you do in this country, when the bottom is gone on the price of crops and cattle and credit ors are going to length to get your last dollar, not

to mention weather like this besides the death in two winters of the two closest to you, i fear the suicidal swing, boots battering from a rope swung over rafters, the bark of a deer rifle shotgun thud or a silence napp in deep snow. it is too dark to seeinside the shed.

morning glare in spiteof no visible sun. oh, i hear, and i walk in enough to make out kenny in a cage of wire panels,forking alfalfa. he said i can't get the tractor out to feed the deer. i'm sorry, kenny, i say. my breath pouring ina gray fan at him. then in fear from what i have

sensed i say, the lord will sustain you. i know. he shoves his glitery tangs of the fork but keeps hold of its handle, orangegloves on his hand. what gets me, he says, ishow it has all changed. everything. it used to be if somethinglike this happened the

neighbors they would be over, they would get here somehow and the family ahead of them. not a person from thefamily has called. i know it is a bad winter but not a person from the family has called on myside or valaria's. hardly anybody has. the worst thing i could sense

is i have. he shakes with anger thatcolors his face but then releases the fork and sighs. did i tell you what brad said to these experts in new york? i'm not sure. they asked him how he kneweverything he did about electronics andtv and computers. he knew more than most guys

with degrees and he knew mek a nicks, so he could --mechanics so he could get close to working things out. he could put in sound systems for these hot shots nobody else could get close towith a ten-foot pole. he put the system in the yacht, george bush used to piddle up and down the potomac inwhen he was president.

not that i ever cared for that double-mouthed sonof a -- excuse me. brad got along so well with people he was the one they sent when there was a badsituation, a delicate negotiation up the road so somebody, people at sony used to ask him, he told me, brad, where did you learn all of

this stuff and youknow what he said? i learned everything i know from my dad on our farm in north dakota. i was born on a cannon ball living on the perries your dream i still here hisdrum pound in me the railroad came and nowthe railroad is gone we watched it leavei will be here

i will be here the railroad is gone grass bleeds green in my soul the hungry city watch the cold and i start to feellike an old buffalo i will be here i will be here i used to say whenthe missiles fly they would blow us allaway to kingdom come let me sing my hymn to us

lt the -- let the dustblow in the west river to the river, it isgone so sitting bull won't you play your drum the drum makes my song strong and i will be here you will be here

the dukan diet while breastfeeding,we will be here >> this production has been provided by read north dakota.

and by the membersof prairie public