The Ohio River is a mile wide at the fourth street wharf, and from the firebox of the last authentic western rivers steamboat still running in America, a person can get lost in the cottonwoods on the far bank, or in the long freight of their own past rolling slow as a coal tow in high water.

This is a book about that losing and finding — written in the lonesome hours of third-shift winters, over warm coffee and morning smokes, in the margins between grief and a new love too good to explain and too real not to try.

These pages follow two years in the life of a faithful writer, a river fireman, and a folk musician still learning the lines of a song well spent. There are hip replacements and hard divorces, cardinal birds on bare branches and mud crackling as it freezes in the dark. There are steamboat captains and railroad ghosts, a nephew trying to navigate seas too vast for any one evening, and a cast iron skillet that turns last night's bones into tomorrow's soup. And then...

somewhere in the middle of all of it - a new call to port in a foreign land: a small town in Vorarlberg, Austria, two blocks from the Rhine, a house built in the 1860s, an entire half of a family tree rooted just around the bend. A new mission, new love, and a whole bunch of new life to navigate.

What you hold is not a tidy memoir. It is fifty-two pickup. It is reading between the lines. It is "in the pocket" where the music lives when the noise of the world gets loud enough that only a roaring firebox can drown it out. Forward or fall / that's the only rule, and these pages live by it, faithfully and without apology, the way a hard-working person does when all that's left is the work and the river and the slow turning of honest days.