It has been said that life is what 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. For as the emotional waters in which they fish become ever more turbulent, Maggie's unspoken feelings of grief, anger, and blame begin to surface--a depth of hurt that forces Dodson to face his own unacknowledged pain and, worse, leaves him feeling helpless to make everything all right in his daughter's life again. Yet if fly-fishing has taught James Dodson anything, it is the rewards of patience, of following the wisdom of the course of the stream, the unexpected revelations reflected in still pools, and, of course an abiding belief in plain dumb luck. With a little of each, these faithful travelers will find their way home again.

Literate, honest, and deeply observant, Faithful Travelers is a beautiful meditation on the bond between parent and child and the nature of love and loss. In Faithful Travelers, James Dodson proves that sometimes life isn't what happens while you're waiting to go fishing: sometimes it happens while you're there.