Based on the life of unconventional aikido master Terry Dobson, this novel tells of two souls at a mutually calamitous turning point in their lives. Fatherless, pushed by his tyrannical mother to the edge of violence, Dobson turns to aikido to save his life.
Told through two interwoven timelines — one following his life through Park Avenue and the Bowery, Vermont, Japan, and California; the other beginning when he returns to the wreckage of his ancestral summer home on Lake Champlain feeling too tainted to train, too blocked to write, and too dispirited to deal with his declining health. He considers disappearing into the icy waters, but instead drives through an ice storm and hits a cow in a cornfield where an artist is chasing her dog . .
This profoundly entertaining novel features a memorable assortment of seekers and gurus (real and fictional), spiritual dogs, performance artists, psychic plumbers, New Age healers, suicidal parents, old lovers; Ronald Reagan, Robert Bly, Leonard Cohen, Ram Dass; and the land itself.