It's 2005, and Elliott Madison, 78, long retired as a newspaper editor, is completing a historical account of how his great-grandparents met and married in the California goldfields in the 1850s.
William Madison's journal begins with his horrendous voyage from South Carolina around Cape Horn; he settles in the Anderson Valley near Boonville.
Amelia Snyder, 18, his great-grandmother, journeys overland from Iowa with her brother and father (her mother died of cholera in 1849). Her letters to cousin Emily are heartbreaking as they recount the tragic trek (including the loss of her father) and its aftermath.
Elliott himself is a quotidian contrast. Long since divorced, his granddaughter Alissa, 23, lives with him in the Bay Area and practices drums for "a heavy metal power trio" named The Sores. She's estranged from her mother, Elliott's daughter, and Elliott spends much of his time researching in the library. Until one day a letter he receives will change his life forever.
"Westbound" ($39.95 in hardcover from NaCl Press; also for Amazon Kindle) seamlessly mingles Elliott's present life with the dramatic accounts of his great-grandparents in a way that makes them present as well.
Amelia writes her cousin: "Father told us we would reach the Platte River today, but we were not prepared for what we saw. It is a river of shallow channels and sandbars, the color of gold as it spreads across the vast plain…. For the first time, I began to understand that even with Father's description of the trail that lies ahead, it is a land that cannot be imagined before it is seen."
Neither can Elliott's own future. That mysterious letter brings a woman named Phoebe into his life, and the house William built for Amelia, and the telling is so poignant I neglected to take notes on the book and just read, entranced.
