"In 1974 a disenfranchised young man from a broken home set out to do the impossible. John Engenes saddled his horse Gizmo and started down the trail on an adventure across the North American continent. Their seven month journey took them across 11 states from California to Virginia, ocean to ocean. As they left the pressing confinement of the city behind them, the pair experienced the isolation and loneliness of the southwestern desert, the vastness of the prairie, as they rode through the great landscapes that make up America. Across hunreds of miles of empty land they slept with coyotes and wild horses under the stars, and in urban areas they camped alone in graveyards and abandoned shacks. Along the way John and Gizmo were transformed from inexperienced horse and rider to veterans of the trail. With his young horse as his spiritual guide John began to comprehend his own place in the world in a search to find peace within himself. Full of humor and heart, Egenes serves up a tale that as big as the America he witnessed- an America that no long exists- on a journey that could only have been experienced step by step, mile by mile, from between the view between a horse's ears."