At the onset of the Environmental Movement, a counter-balanced circus weaves colorful braids around the maypole hailing the fertility of Earth.
Since about the Summer of Love, hippy Forward has heard and repeated the mantra many times. But when his chopper disassembles in a high-speed police chase over mountain gravel, and he and a remaining handlebar slide into a forest situation far from his easy sources of mind expansion, his thoughts contract again on the consideration: "Can that really be right, man...that everything is just how it's supposed to be?" Meanwhile, David Marley's immovable patriotism has derailed his career in Intelligence. Home from Vietnam, he's a sheriff's deputy now. Piecing together a small-town murder recapitulated on scales reaching that of the whole planet, he is tutored by biker Eightball, Alfonso the evergreen Chicano, and an old man who likes to climb up on church billboards and rearrange the letters.
In the descended spirit of Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, this novel finds the emerging environmental crisis to be rooted in the divorce between science and spirituality. Through a self-assembling effort, the town of Ashton recreates the purification process called "katharsis" once used by the Pythagorean Brotherhood to combine the mystical and the rational into a mode of inquiry capable of illuminating the natural relationship between man and Earth.