A teenage boy's tough ride across an unforgiving country.

In the year 1967, fifteen-year-old Robin Wallenco steals an antique pick-up truck and heads west from south Saskatchewan, driving on farmland and obscure roads to avoid police. Like Odysseus trying to return to his home, he encounters one mysterious situation after another: men on the run from police and their pasts, hippies trying to create a utopia,...

A teenage boy's tough ride across an unforgiving country.

In the year 1967, fifteen-year-old Robin Wallenco steals an antique pick-up truck and heads west from south Saskatchewan, driving on farmland and obscure roads to avoid police. Like Odysseus trying to return to his home, he encounters one mysterious situation after another: men on the run from police and their pasts, hippies trying to create a utopia, farmers switching their crop to marijuana, a raging fire in the Rockies. What he passes through is a microcosm of a massively changing society -- a rural culture that, though eroding, hangs on to values of kindness and endurance, and one in which Robin must act far older than his years.

When Robin's purpose is revealed, this story becomes at once heartbreaking and heartwarming, an indirect look at childhood trauma through the eyes of a wildly brave yet non-comprehending victim, a man-boy who is both heroic and vulnerable.

A RARE MACHINES BOOK