Another fun life story from Hannah: 

Life out on the plains of North Dakota may be boring at times, but those times don’t last for long.  That was especially true of life with my father.  Because he refused to pay the electric bill, he had to find an alternative source of power.  There was always some project in progress that was supposed to make our lives easier.

One of these projects was an old wind generator Dad picked up at an auction sale.  He got it running and then realized he would need to  put it high enough to catch the wind, so he took a trip to Bismarck and purchased three steel pipes which he screwed together.

I don’t know what they were made for, but my dad rigged the wind generator to fit on one end of the pipe.   Then he dug a hole right next to an old cottonwood tree in our front yard.  He filled the hole with cement and stood the pipe up in the middle of it.  He had tied several ropes to the top of the pipe, which he staked down to hold the pipe upright until the cement was dry.

The next part was getting the generator up there.  I’m not sure what happened, but I do know that the generator came crashing to the ground in such a way that it never worked again. 

The pipe we had in our front yard was the tallest thing on the farm.  It was several feet taller than the cottonwood tree it stood next to.  I don’t know what dad did with the generator, but the pipe stood in the yard for at least ten years.

About a month after the pipe was put up we had a severe thunderstorm.  It rolled in at about two in the morning.  The thunder was so loud it shook the house.  Then there was one blast that felt so close that I felt I was right next to it. 

I was huddled under the covers when I heard the door open.  I wondered who was crazy enough to go out in that weather.  The next morning my father said he had gone to see what had been struck by lightening.  Something had been hit, and when he couldn’t find anything he realized the pipe was the only thing that would have remained undamaged after a blast like that.