In 1947, nine-year-old Buck is sent to live with his grandparents in a small hamlet in the Cascades after his father is killed in WWII and his mother becomes consumed by grief. While enjoying unique experiences with his taxi-cab owning grandpa, Buck also confronts the community's darker aspects and becomes involved in a life-threatening conflict.

It's 1947, nine-year-old Buck is the precocious son of a focused sculptress who's husband -- Buck's dad -- has been killed in combat in the closing days of WWII. Consumed by her loss, Buck's mother sends him to live with his grandparents in a small hamlet in the backwoods of the Cascades. Riding shotgun with his grandpa, the proprietor of the hamlet's only taxi-cab. Buck faces experiences and challenges few his age have had the chance to enjoy and contend with. Eventually, he is exposed to the dark side of the community's denizens, and finds himself embroiled in a conflict that could cost him his life.

When my mom was nineteen, she became my dad's fifth wife. It was 1931. He was sixty-four, well-off and my mom's parents, with five children, still in tow, were living in an apple orchard near Carlton, Oregon. My granddad was a proud man, so his circumstance had to have been difficult for him to accept. I'm not going to go into the drama that dropped him, with his family, destitute, into that apple orchard, and I have chosen not to assume conclusions the related facts suggest. But the experiences of antecedents wend their way into the personality, character, and talents of offspring. Given the impact my granddad's travail must have had on my mom, logically, she passed defensive molecular DNA to me. It was back to basics. Skills for survival became mandatory. No little helix spirals of talent, character, or charm churned in the mix of my genetic mulch. No great art craft, musical skills, thespian nuance, or athletic prowess; just the basics. I was aptly prepared for a life of hard labor. After years spent gradually transcending from paperboy, to lawn mower, furniture mover, choker setter, mill worker, soldier, parole officer, construction worker, builder, and entrepreneur, I found myself old and idle with inherited genes too worn to support laborious endeavors. I did have successes, the principle one being a 52-year marriage with four kids: three successful adults and one child whose life was sadly cut short in her infancy. But success had to wend its way through four grade schools, four high schools, often without parental oversight, and four colleges, followed by frequent failures and financial missteps. My one option was to utilize the experiences of an undisciplined life set to paper by fact and fiction for whatever benefit others might ferret out.