In November of 2000, after the presidential election but before the final results were handed down by the Supreme Court, John Daniel climbed into his pickup, drove to a remote location in the Oregon's Rogue River Canyon, and quit civilization. The strictures set up were severe. No two-way human communication - not even with his wife - no radio, no music, not even his cat. He would isolate himself in a cabin sure to be snowed in soon after his arrival, intent on hearing no human voice but his own until spring thawed the road.<BR>Thoreau's Walden and Journals came with him for inspiration and instruction. Daniel would practice his domestic economy, meditate every day, and keep a journal, writing about the experience of solitude. But in addition to the mental and physical rigors of isolation, he intended to do spiritual work during his sojourn: to come to terms with his dead father, a charismatic union organizer during the heyday of the American labor movement, and to relive the troubled passage of his late teens and early twenties in the 1960s, when he dropped out of college, dithered over the military draft, and lived as a hippie in San Francisco and Portland. These narratives weave together, and the result, Rogue River Journal, is a memoir of the joys and tribulations of solitude, the mysteries of growing up, and the haunting legacies of a father.