Zencey's way home takes us many places: to a starlit mountaintop, where a nineteenth-century sect awaits the second coming; to the northern woods during hunting season; to the salt marshes ora Delaware childhood; to the softball games and abandoned mill ponds of his adopted Vermont. Always we are shown a world outside our preconceptions. In the essay "In Search of Virgin Forest" we see that virgin forest is not the pure escape from civilization that romantics make of it. Like the second-growth forest around it, virgin forest too is a human construct, one whose "different disturbance history" is not natural but is equally the product of human perception and appropriation.

A nationally acclaimed novelist, Zencey brings together autobiography and philosophy to produce a work at once accessible and intellectually rigorous.