The man who heard the land

the long version

"A man driving a lonely Minnesota highway hears the voice of the land and embarks on an arduous odyssey of self-discovery. Although he is an adjunct lecturer teaching a course called "Literature and the Environment," the man soon realizes that there is much he must still learn about the state. He submerges himself into the history of the region, trying to piece together geology, Native folklore, and early exploration literature, all in an effort to decipher what the land has said.". "Along the way he experiences the deaths of his parents; he is stranded in an ice-fishing house for a cold winter night; he helps rescue a family from a flood of the Red River. He encounters more elusive obstacles when he tries to gather his material into a book but becomes hopelessly entangled in complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions. But the more the man works to uncover universal truths, the more he circles toward certain inescapable realities in his own life. The Man Who Heard the Land is a small masterpiece of prose - at once an enthralling narrative of one man's personal quest and a deeply probing meditation on each person's place in history."--BOOK JACKET.