An elegy for the Milwaukee Railroad and a memoir of the author's youth traveling the lines. Johnson's step-father was a passenger conductor on the "road" that covered the Washington, Idaho, and Montana states. As a child, he often accompanied his step-father on trips and in this volume revisits the Spokane, Avery, and Butte depots first in his memory of the glorious and glamorous railroad days of the 1940s and then in the present where he finds the literal ruins of that past life. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.