It has been said that life happens while you're waiting to go fishing. Only weeks after his eleven-year marriage abruptly ended in an amicable divorce, James Dodson decided to go on a fly-fishing pilgrimage west. His goal - to heal his wounded spirit and explain as best he could the vagaries of life and love to his beautiful, precocious seven-year-old daughter, Maggie. So with his beat-up truck and his aging retriever, Dodson and Maggie set out without plans or reservations, following where the spirit - and the lure of America's mighty rivers - leads them, on their way to one of America's grandest treasures - Yellowstone National Park. They travel from the Adirondacks to the mist-shrouded Niagara Falls; from the Michigan lakes Hemingway roamed as a boy to small-town county fairs; from the majesty of Mount Rushmore to the mysticism of Harney's Peak - all the way to the fly-fisherman's paradise of the San Juan River. Together, they are bound by a tie as resilient and unpredictable as a fly-fisherman's line.