MPR News Feature; Soundscape features sounds of the harvest on the northern plains

With a record. It's already going to. Get. Better. Maybe. Right Mike. You're. Right.

Right right. Right right but never the right. Thing. They're. Never going to matter. The hardest thing at night is completely different from the day because the day you can see

everything and you know where you're at. But at night you almost have to go into a complete geek like her driving a truck to implode a combine because we have both moving the same time. Well like when I have to back up to a grain elevator that elevates the grain into the granary but at night you have all the crickets and grasshoppers everything and noise amplifies and you hear thing becomes quiet and like a lot of these dust clouds just are almost stagnated like yours and then you have the lights on the come going to repairing it was just like out of science fiction or whatever and you're like in third of a suspension a lot of the dirt will wade with all of it with a different world. Last two years before this year it was awful dry meat and it was

real wet in the spring when it had no rain at all during the growing season. We're still having a lot of rain. Old timers just a faded guy are scared to death when you're starving to death and it's kind of interesting because again if they die all the time you know in the nursing care and now into points and temper. There was where their presidents or hen or when. How do you define Nate. Yeah it's going to be a beautiful day the local. Only the wind is moving now the grass turning in upon itself. The farmer's

boots stand empty on the porch. Even the window sleep. Suddenly the eyes of the clouds are open. The lightning stalks the windrows five miles down. Closer and closer. Out in the fields all the abandoned machines begin to awaken corn pickers combine Baylor's circling in a heavy dance routing the ground with their snouts an ancient John Deere tractor is leading them westward toward the conspiracy of the iron voices of the lightning. Now they are waiting steaming and shuddering and the first assault of rain. The sounds of the harvest on the northern plains recorded on the N-Gage farm near Pillsbury North Dakota. The poetry was written and read by Morehead Minnesota poet Mark Vance. I'm Johnny.