The time is 1950. The place is a growing suburb in the rolling, green hills west of Portland, Oregon. The horrendous events of World War II still haunt the lives of the adults, but they do their best to hide it. The kids live in their shadows, but are preoccupied mostly with negotiating the confusing obstacle course of growing up.
The reader arrives here in the year 2010 on the memory of Scotty O'Toole, a semi-retired newspaper columnist who makes the mistake of trusting the insulative powers of time's passing to rationalize a golf outing to his old neighborhood. There, five decades before, he had led a band of kids in a losing battle to prevent their woods from being turned into this very golf course. And, indeed, soon after arriving with his mostly-retired friends at Tualatin Woods Golf & Country Club, Scotty is reminded how sharp life had been for a boy whose youthful idealism pitted him against the forces of adult realism and whose sense of duty as an elder pitted him against the powers of a precocious younger brother who is dangerously and fearlessly adventurous.
For Scotty, the man, this golf outing becomes a trip back in time where by reliving the motives and actions of Scotty, the boy, he comes to terms with a question that has haunted him for 50 years: Had they done the right thing in defending the forest, or had the heartbreaking costs been too great to justify their defiance?
