Message on the Wind: A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern Plains

"I call it the sacred corridor. That's a poetic name for a district that most people would do anything to avoid, a corridor travelers pass through as quickly as possible, with their souls and windows closed, and describe later as the flatest, dreariest, most isolated country they have ever seen.

This book is a love song to that lonely country...I call it the landscape of the improbable. The promise of America is that we will create a society equal to the magnificence of the continent on which we have planted it. It is not quite too late. I remember how inspired I felt the first time I heard Wallace Stegner's phrase, 'a society to match the landscape.'

At a time when rural America has fewer advocates than at any previous era in our history, I wish to argue that our national renewal must come from the empty quarter, the backwater villages and the unvisited buttes of the American West. As a nation, we are being destroyed by mobility, abstraction from nature, alienation from the macrobiotics of the food chain and the food supply, and addiction to homogenized comforts that deracinate us from the life of the spirit. This is a book about spirit of place."