Amazon.com description: Product Description: Life is a road, and on every road as in every life, there are angels.

Sometimes big events have small origins. There was no divorce, no loss of job, no dramatic crisis of faith and self-confidence. It was, at heart, the accretion of little things, like a deepening blanket of snow, that finally caused the branch to snap and sent me careening back to the West Coast from my comfortable home in the woods of northern Minnesota.

Let me tell you how it happened.

Author Kent Nerburn was feeling stuck in the middle: middle age, midway in a career, and in the middle of the Midwest. Fearing that his passion and spirit for life were dimming and worried that his family needed to escape the harsher realities of Minnesota life, Nerburn set out from the stark, frozen landscape of a northern winter to drive alone down the coastal roads of Washington, Oregon, and California.

Yes, this road is layered with ghosts. The good padres, the less good padrones, the Indians who have been all but forgotten, the workers and the laborers and the migrants and the serfs; the wealthy and the desperate, the starlets and the Okies, the families coming soon to their cul-de-sac lives.

All have traveled this road in search of their own private El Dorado. And now I too am among them, just one more sojourner searching for waters to slake my unquenchable American thirst.

Ride shotgun with Kent Nerburn as he uncovers the myths and dreams of America's West Coast. Road Angels is a search for home that brings us face-to-face with unexpected places and extraordinary people -- a journey of profound insights about how the land we claim affects every aspect of our lives.