Come along on an intimate journey through the last great forests in America - by trail and canoe, by back road and blue highway. Along the way you'll meet an amazing collection of people, their lives still firmly wed to the woods: plant healers and mountaineers in the hollers of Appalachia, guides in the far reaches of Maine, Ojibway story tellers on the north shore of Lake Superior. These enchanting places, this unforgettable cast of characters, onery and thoughtful and freewheeling, can rekindle an almost forgotten brand of nature appreciation - a grass-roots, blue-collar kind of passion which was for a time the very backbone of American literature and mythology. Saving what's left of the American outback, Ferguson maintains, may well depend on reviving this common, wild heart of our founding, the times when nature and patriotism and religion were bound together as one.