The Long Way Home

In a travel memoir that ventures from his smalltown upbringing to vastly different cultures around the globe, Tom Montgomery Fate comes to define "home" not as a physical location, but as a way of belonging. "Migrating birds have an internal compass that allows them to home their way back to their nesting place each spring," he writes. "For birds, home is both verb and noun--both journey and destination." The same is true for Fate. Whether he is bobbing in a canoe in the freezing rain with his son on a Canadian lake, praying with Lakota elders in a sweat lodge in South Dakota, or teaching English in a remote Filipino village, these are not stories of arrival. They are detours of discovery, a spiritual wayfinding through the wilderness of time and memory.