"Read him." - George Elliott Clarke, author of I & I and George and Rue An award-winning author goes looking for the meaning of family and belonging on a glorious wild-goose-chase road trip across middle America Wangersky's great-great-grandfather crossed the continent in search of gold in 1849. William Castle Dodge was his name, and he was 22 years old. He wrote a diary of that eventful journey that comes into the author's hands 160 years later. And typically, quixotically, Wangersky decides to follow Dodge's westward trail across the great bulging middle of America, not in search of gold but something even less likely: that elusive thing called family. What ensues becomes this story, by turns hilarious and profound, about a very long trip - by car, in Wangersky's case, and on mule and foot in Dodge's. Interweaving his experiences on the road with Dodge's diary, the author contemplates the human need to hunt for roots and meaning as he - and Dodge - encounter immigrants who risk everything to be somewhere else, while only glimpsing those who are there already and who want to hold onto their claim in the stream of human migration. Same Ground is a story about what time washes away and what persists - and what we might find, unexpectedly, if we go looking. A personal tale of parallel journeys separated by almost two centuries - by car, in Wangersky's case, and on mule and foot in the case of his great-great-grandfather William Castle Dodge. Russell Wangersky is the multiple-award-winning author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, including Burning Down the House, Whirl Away, and The Hour of Bad Decisions. Formerly a columnist with the SaltWire newspaper chain, he is currently editor-in-chief of the Saskatchewan Postmedia newspapers. He lives in Saskatoon, SK. It's like watching dominos fall, like a science fiction movie, every member of my mother's side of the family toppling over and turning to dust. No, less than dust-to nothing, as if they'd never been. It's all because of the simplest of things: my wife saying, "If William Dodge had died out here, none of you would ever even have been born." And we wouldn't: if he'd been bitten by a rattlesnake (he almost was) or shot (he almost was) or died of influenza (he almost did), that would have been it right there. That whole side of my family, and me - and my children - simply would never have been. But he wasn't. So we were, and we are. She says it to me first as we sit deep in the blazing High Rock Canyon in Nevada, in the heat-shimmer and dust and scarcity of it, and she says it again as we pass beside the big blue bowl of Walker Lake, heading south towards Vegas. We drive through an artillery base, the ground on both sides of the road hummocked with row after row of ammunition bunkers - the Hawthorne Army Depot, 2,400 ammunition bunkers - the ground pimpled with mounds of high explosive all around us. I can't help but suddenly feel just as unsafe as my great-great-grandfather must have felt in 1849. I've been thinking a lot about risk, about how we're all just binary switches in the great computer of the universe. Ones and zeros, switches that are either turned on, or turned off. That, if North Korea wanted to make a point, the 147,000 acres that comprise the largest ammunition depot in the world might be the right place to start. Ironic that the road we're driving on is named the Veterans Memorial Highway. There isn't any safe ground out here. Road crews work in the crushing heat, laying down asphalt that runs to the very horizon. Tanker trucks spread water to hold the dust down. We pass a massive array of solar mirrors, directing the bright sun to a collector atop a tower at the center of the mirrored circle, a tower looking for all the world like the Eye of Sauron. We pass the eerie Clown Motel on the high ground at Tonopa

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