Twenty-five years ago they bought a homestead, in the middle of Vancouver Island, on the water¿s edge. There are still reflections off the small lake at the foot of Mount Benson- of gardens and vineyards and woodland encounters. Westwood Lake Chronicles is a dreamscape diary, a backyard inventory of life and death in paradise, and the desperate pressures that threaten its existence.Lawrence Winkler has written an anthem to living deliberately with nature, and the virtues of simplicity, self-sufficiency, solitude, and silence. Find refuge.

The American West was a notion, not a nation. It was a process, not a place. The native animal and human life of the West was displaced, replaced, and exterminated- sixty million bison to make way for European bog animals, billions of passenger pigeons for nothing, and ninety percent of aboriginal native Americans, out of an original population of possibly a hundred million, by accident and design. Late in the summer of 2013, I set out to find the Old West, what it had been, and what had replaced it. The quest for my own wild panorama would turn wheels of fortune into a movable feast of Wagon Days. And if this don’t get your fire started, your wood’s wet.

It lives in the hole where the moon used to be. And for most of the worst part of the northern winter, over the last two decades, so have we. The real South Pacific was not a Bali Hai musical, but a drama of cannibals and castaways, headhunters and slavers, paradise and perdition. This is a book of saline psalms. This is water.

Most remote islands of the imagination conjure up paradise. Japan is an archipelago of puzzlement. From the sands that forged their swords and serenity, they traveled a Samurai Road of temples and shrines, feudal fortresses, and flowing mountain streams of wasabi. On sashimi and soy sauce, and green tea over rice, they lived a thousand years of pathos, under cherry blossoms and ephemeral moonlight, in Zen gardens and futon dreams. It was all so perfect.

Heraclitus’ fragments come together, to life, and towards its antitheses, in this fantastic metaphysical journey. Forty years after Orion’s Cartwheels hitchhiking circumnavigation of the planet, Steve of the Jacuzzi returns to accompany the good doctor, on another series of road trips, to Alsace and Central Africa and Tennessee, in a penultimate bucket list Grand Tour. Together, they experience issues of survival on an interstellar Worldship, the epiphanies of perfect late harvest wine, tracking of gorillas in the Impenetrable Forest, a general who fought too much (while another fought not at all), and the thrill of the world’s most famous barbecue competition. Catch it, in the air.

In the summer of 1980, a maverick young doctor gave it all up, to hitchhike around the world. The first arc he carved with his thumb stopped a little red pickup that took him over the horizon. Like his mythical hunter companion, Orion, he was on a vision quest, propelled toward the dawn to have his sight restored. This is the story of that five-year odyssey to discover his Destiny.