There is No Future in the Past: A Travel Memoir

Perhaps it was growing up by the Red River of the North, a renegade river with a mind of its own. After college graduation, Elizabeth Nagel left behind the prairie and parental expectations, for urban life in Washington DC in the sixties and beyond to a landscape of mountains and the sea. As she traveled further, other people and their cultures opened her heart and taught her new ways of being in the world.

With a poet's voice and an artist's eye, Elizabeth weaves together her life-stories with her travels. Ultimately her writing is about becoming ''un-stranded and free, about going to the ends of the earth and the edges of experience'' in a journey of self-discovery. She does so in a way that invites readers to open their hearts to the wild and the wilderness, so they may examine the truths and mysteries of their own lives.