Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge

esistant barriers, causing you to hit them and then push
through, hit the next drift and push through.
A young farm kid, still in his teens, tried to drive an
open road home in one of those blizzards that winter. In
North Dakota, everything is so open and flat that it is
possible to drive right off a highway and into a ditch and
only know you've left the road because you've hit a barbed
wire fence. That boy was considered to be very lucky--to
have survived a night without emergency supplies in his
car, alone. I wonder now, how he will farm his family's
land, having lost both his arms and his legs, amputated
because of the hypothermia and frostbite.
When you have been out in the cold for a long time,
your hands and feet go numb. They are the farthest from
your heart, farthest from the supply of warm blood. I rub
my hands together, take off my mittens and breathe the
moist air from my lungs into them, clenching them,
unclenching them and put my gloves back on. It is getting
dark. There is no setting sun to see, it is the gradual
receding of the light, the encroachment of the dark. I cannot
feel my toes anymore. I have been skating on the creek
which winds like a snake in the woods behind my parent's
house. It is suddenly time to go in. I struggle up the
embankment still in my skates, grabbing onto exposed tree
limbs and tough dead grasses to pull myself up. The
darkness brings with it fear. The cloud cover that has hung
ominously overhead all day has parted and I see glimpses
of a pale wintry moon rising slowly in the sky through the
bare tree branches. I am young, but instinct tells me to get
to shelter soon.
Expecting the treatment of manic-depressive illness to
proceed in a straightforward manner is likely to create
secondary problems. As new medications, like prozac, are
created and used, so are new expectations regarding
immediate cures. Periods of normal time are often affected
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