The summer Aldous Bohm turns nine, his parents move to the woods near Snoqualmie ,Washington, "to reinvent the American family." The Bohm's are working class hippies in post-Vietnam America. Their makeshift pastoral takes shape in a haze of pot smoke and good intentions and ultimately births a vortex of personal insecurity and romanticism taking the family deeper into the woods to destroy them. Aldous oversees these tragedies, recalled a decade later, after he has left Snoqualmie to join the military in the buildup to the first Gulf War. This novel conjoins the dead end narrative of American masculinity with the Romantic ideal of nature to suggest an ambivalent way forward, a path out of these woods.