Nothing I have written would have been possible without the love of my wife and partner of forty odd years, Ann, whose nurturing of my bisexuality and commitment to our marriage saved me. My life has been enriched by the friendship of and investment by many kohai, senpai, sensei, and sifu.
This work has been patiently edited by a collaborator, VWL, aka re-c, without whose assistance the work would not have been completed and without whose insight the work would be inferior to its present state. His own work is notable. Any remaining structural defects, inconsistencies, or continuity issues are my responsibility.
In 1918, William Wallace Campbell, the director of the Lick Observatory in California, travelled to Goldendale, Washington, which lay in the center of the path of totality of a solar eclipse. Campbell was seeking to prove that Einstein's Theory of General Relativity was correct. His equipment was inferior because his best telescopes and cameras were still in the Crimea, prisoners of the Great War. His results from Goldendale were inconclusive. In 1922, he journeyed to Australia, where he photographed the eclipse there. These photographs helped prove the theory — light was indeed bent by the curvature of space-time. Newton's notion of gravity was overthrown or deepened.
Goldendale is then a real city in a real state in the USA, but the Goldendale in this fable shares only geography with its namegiver. This is not to say that the geography is unimportant, because the geography is as much a character in the story as the human and animal characters. All characters, while perhaps exhibiting traits of people I know, are entirely fictional and any resemblance to people alive or who have died is coincidental.
Journeys are seldom without pain.
Although many of the characters are gay or bisexual, the story treats the relationship of fathers to sons and the place of male mentors in the lives of young men and women regardless of sexual orientation.
I am utterly unapologetic about brief descriptions of sexual activity in the story. I see no reason to ignore a fundamental mode of relationship among humans. I do not think that descriptions of sex must be any more or less interesting than descriptions of other forms of human interaction.