About this ebook
Two middle aged new-comers have arrived to live beside Grouse Creek for different reasons: Rhododendron to enjoy a late-life relationship with Mother Nature; and Elliot to build a house in the wilderness and then write a book about it for profit. Rhododendron soon discovers that she is confronted by a long suppressed grievance against her husband a grievance for which she ultimately sees no remedy except to move on with her life.
Nathaniel is again drawn into the adversity that afflicts the world beyond his mountain home when a US Marshal appears at his log house with instructions for him and Esmeralda to pack-up and leave. The result of the marshal's visit is the jailing of Esmeralda and Chico, and the gun-shot wounding of Nathaniel as he escapes into the woods.
Nathaniel's cousin Barry becomes despondent over the untimely death of his wife, a death that has left him with a precocious seven-year-old daughter to parent. One afternoon in a smoke filled blackcap patch, Barry and Rhododendron discover that each has a desperate hunger for the other and that neither is inclined to deny his appetites.
Victoria receives a telephone message from a man who introduces himself as Dennis and tells her that he believes that the two of them could combine their efforts toward a mutual goal; that he has in mind two things: expanding the territory served by The Gallery from the upper five counties of the Idaho Panhandle to the whole wide world; and expanding The Gallery's product line to include all artistic endeavor. Dennis also mentions that Victoria is to consider the inordinate amount of money required for this venture to be no object she is to leave the money to him.
Thus begins to flow a rapid stream of events: Nathaniel goes to Emily at Arrowhead Point to recuperate from his gun-shot wound and to plan his return to The Old Growth to defend his home. Emily takes advantage of Nathaniel's convalescence to paint his portrait. Barry resigns from the US Forest Service as the result of political chicanery and moves to Washington, DC, to work as the understudy for the senior senator from Idaho. Rhododendron divorces Elliot and moves to Spokane, Washington, to work for The Sierra Club and to be near Barry. Victoria accepts Barry's seven-year-old daughter as her change. Dennis and his life-long lover, Doris, inform Victoria that they want her to become the modern day Lorenzo de' Medici for the entire planet. Victoria is stunned by the radical changes looming before her should she accept Doris and Dennis's financial donation; but she cannot imagine not accepting the opportunity that is hers for the taking.
By the end of the tale, readers have become aware of what Lucretius, the Roman poet and philosopher, had written centuries before: that no single thing abides but all things flow.
About the author
Robert H Wright was born during 1931 in Nicaragua where his father, a banana plantation overseer, was employed by United Fruit Company. During the first decade of his life, home was Nicaragua, then Honduras, and then Guatemala. When the US was drawn into World War II by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US government commandeered the United Fruit Company’s steamships—the Great White Fleet—thus ending all shipments of bananas. At this time, after some twenty years of living abroad, Wright’s father took his children to his childhood home in Cherokee County, East Texas.
At Alto, Texas, Wright was placed into the fifth grade. He attended his first day at school without knowing a word of English. After graduating from high school, he enlisted into the USAF and served for thirty-nine months—twenty-six months at a fighter base named Neubiburg just outside of Munich, Germany. Discharged from the USAF, and after a brief stint at the University of Texas, he drifted into the petroleum industry. Wright worked in sales and service in the drilling and production segments of the industry at many domestic oil producing areas, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming; and at international areas throughout South America, from Maracaibo to Punta Arenas. Wright resided at Buenos Aires during the year 1962. Ultimately, after thirty-four years in the workforce, Wright elected to take early retirement in 1988.
Thus, at age fifty-six, Robert and wife Carol began anew when they moved from bustling Houston to a quiet and remote ten acres on the north fork of Grouse Creek in Bonner County, Idaho. At Grouse Creek, they adapted to living in concert with nature, providing for themselves, or doing without those municipal amenities taken for granted by urban dwellers but not available to woodsies—electricity, water, paved streets, mail delivery, etc. Also at Grouse Creek, Wright found that, for the first time in his life, he had the major ingredients for writing—will, opportunity, solitude, and serenity. At Grouse Creek, he wrote Apology to Grouse Creek and Ten Percent Marriage, the first two novels of a trilogy set in Sandpoint. He also finished the first draft of the manuscript for a third novel, Papelón, set in Buenos Aires during 1962. Advancing age forced the Wrights to give up the rough life of mountain living. They came in from the woods in 2001, moving into nearby Sandpoint where they reside today, and where he finished writing the third novel of the Sandpoint trilogy, All Things Flow.