Across the Blue Ridge Mountains stretches a world both charming and complicated. Jeremy Jones and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior. He takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school and sets out on a search to understand how this ancient land has shaped its people--how it shaped him. His search sends him burrowing in the past--hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accentsand immigrant populations, tracing both Walmart sidewalks and carved-out mountains--and pondering the future. He meshes narrative and myth, geology and genealogy, fiddle tunes and local color in his exploration of the briskly changing and oft-stigmatized world of his native southern Appalachians and particularly the mystical Bearwallow Mountain, a peak suddenly in flux.