The Rest of the Way Home

Improbable—that you have been there. The top of where we are, the bottom rung, the source of the family fortune if you can imagine what that might be.

In winter come a blizzard, the trees in the Moores’ backyard would shape the swirl, so the snow bank would stay hollow at center and pile steep on two sides. The resultant sloop would hold twenty kids if we had had that many, and all but the smallest could peek over the sides to see if a lynx might come running by—but not stop where we were.--from the book

An account of the author's early years in Maida and Langdon, North Dakota, and his discovery, as an adult, of the work of Thorarin Snowfield, a reclusive artist of the region. Although the author did not encounter Snowfield as a child, he is fascinated and traces the artist's life, locates some 70 privately owned paintings, and organizes an exhibition of them at the North Dakota Museum of Art. In the process he finds his way back to his roots and regains his attachment to the places of his youth, and to the person he was and has become.

Clyde Burkholder spent forty years teaching English at the University of South Dakota and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He prepared for that work at UND, Jamestown College, USD, and UNL. Retired, he walks and looks around.