Evidence of the Journey: Stories of Place

"The stories, conceived separately but somehow each intertwined into a cohesive whole, range greatly in their subject matter... Each story exquisitely melds humor with paintings of memorable landscapes of nature... Board's collection of stories is masterfully welded with his perceptions of often-ignored issues in today's society, both tangible and intangible. His humor is quiet and strikes at unexpected places, leaving the careful and capable reader thoroughly tickled at times." -- Red City Review (4 stars) In this age teetering between excess in many areas, and want and depletion in so many others, this is a collection of human-scale stories about wary, deliberated hopefulness. It's a cycle of eight "placed" stories loosely linked to each other (each contains a veiled cameo by a character from another story). All happen in the broad Northern California bioregion, which offers such diverse opportunities for re-creation, respite, and rumination. My favorite places and personas are those found at or beyond the margins of tourism ad campaigns and travel touts. The protagonists include: a wizened ranching dowager; a mid-life hospice chaplain; a quizzically observant grocery store clerk; a sauntering, musical north coast quasi-Indian and his raffish uncle; a flippant disc golfer forced to put on his big-boy pants; the survivors of a deluge of biblical proportion; an aging Basque sheepherder and an ursine trickster; a young urban denizen who wants to see a whale; and a defrocked wine country priest trailed by a shadowy cartel weed entrepreneur. Water, in various guises, also braids its way ambiguously through these stories.