| Summary: | rock beneath which 1 day-dreamed many a summer day, where 1 sometimes prayed, sometimes wished, and often came just to bask in the solidity of that hill and the comfort of the homestead below. My earliest memories are of the hill stretching behind the house and barn and outbuildings like a protective hand, seemingly keeping the worst of the bad storms -winter and summer - that always arose from the southeast from our doorstep (untrue, of course, but a "big hill" tends to support the triumph of hope over reason). I remember the first times 1 ran up the hill, the first time I came down in a sled (to a five-year-old, it was like breaking the sound barrier, so fast did one come down the hill and turn sharply to the left in front of the huge barn and on to the house), the sight of horse-drawn wagons of grain bundles cresting the hill and descending to the echoes of my father, Albert, cautioning the team, "Whoa, Kate! Whoa! Whoa, Ben!" It was down this hill that I rode my horse Teenie one summer day, racing my big brother Jim, who was on a tractor pulling a load of bales. 1 dropped a rein - bad mistake. When one dropped a rein, Teenie stopped quicker than the best trained calf-roping quarter horse. 1 sailed over Teen ie's' head and landed on my own inches from the big rock on the big hill - without a scratch, my head in an ant pile. Down that hill 1 came in my early teens in our 1948 Ford truck loaded far too high with bales. As 1 started to brake, with the clutch out, for some reason known only to adolescents, my foot descended to the floor board. No brakes! 1 panicked, came down the hill faster than I did on a sled, and drove right into the barn. Ever after, my father would ask, from time to time, why didn't you just turn to the right and keep on going up the road past the house? In countless dreams, facing uncertain times, I've run up that hill and embraced that rock in silent transcendence of time and space, finding strength and resolve, an anchor in my memory, that "big hill of home." It's the hill up which my mother, Hulda, would walk to the south fields with lunch for all during harvest, the hill where we buried Curly after he returned from bringing home the cows for the final morning and quietly retiring to the shade of the house to breath his last. It's the hill where my family found shelter, the hill that stood sentinel over home and hearth. Let the wind be from the southeast, the skies deep blue, and the ozone heavy in the air the day my ashes are released at the top of that hill over the abandoned, leveled homestead, next to the big rock on that big hill of home. And may that day be no sooner than necessary. Born in the heart of Oliver County, Everett Alters has served as the executive director of the North Dakota Humanities Council, the state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, since if began in 1973. A graduate of Dickinson State College (University) and Colorado State 'University, Alters has edited and authored books about North Dakota, including his recent "The Saga of Seaman: The Story of the Dog Who Went With Lewis and Clark," the tale of the famous Newfoundland told in heroic verse with an essay about the most famous of American dogs. 38 2003-2005 North Dakota Blue Book
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