History and fiction are blended in the pages of this three-part story about artists in northern Arizona.
In Part I a New York painter learns she has tuberculosis and travels west to Flagstaff in 1921, hoping for a cure. She finds a raw little town that is "too droll for words" but as she comes to know a few people (some fictional and some historical), she becomes involved in a life very different from that of New York. Told in the style of popular fiction of the 1920s, the story takes her through twenty months of Flagstaff history.
Part II is a biography of the historical artist Lillian Wilhelm Smith ((1882 - 1972), who rode to Rainbow Bridge with Zane Grey and John Wetherill in 1913. For the following 60 years, the rest of her life, she traveled through the open miles of Arizona, painting its landscape and meeting people of all kinds.
In Part III, the grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters of the fictional women of Part I are working for the Coconino National Forest in 1996 as patrol, law enforcement, and lookout. Through their memories the lives of women 75 years earlier are carried on. A homicide tests the late 20th-century women and turns their lives in new directions. The story goes on, unresolved, into the future, as stories do.
Life and death, love and connections -- Time -- are the themes that unify the three sections.
