3A remote Eskimo island village is the healing destination for Gus Rivers. The story is NOME, a fictional adventure memoir of a man lost in the confused dissolution of his marriage. Believing the unfordable chasm of argument and pain can only be bridged through separation, Rivers leaves his wife and two teenaged children behind for Alaska's isolation. Rivers quickly becomes lost in an alien world that is not what he hoped to find. His love affair with an Eskimo woman takes him to Nome and a culture of excess centered on a charismatic drug dealer with a firm grip on his world and anyone entering its sphere. Nome is a haven for transient souls hiding from reality. The town is a multilayered experience anchored by its quieter, permanent residents, and covered by the raucous flow of ephemeral lives lost in attempts to alter their past. On the surface, it is the Wild West reborn-a concentrated microcosm of all Rivers has left behind where his problems are magnified to extremes. Like shoveling its gold-rich sands against the tide, Nome never relieves Rivers of the burdens he has come to forget. Betrayal, violent death, and the wild tundra force him to recognize his own mortality and a family unwilling to forget the pain.