At the End of Ridge Road traces Joseph Bruchac’s path from “nature nut” to jock to writer, to his home at the end of Ridge Road near where he was raised by his grandparents. This colorful memoir explores the links between Bruchac’s native Abenaki culture and his long-held views on human dignity and social justice.

Asking readers to remove their watches to they might “live time” rather than be ruled by it, Bruchac tells his own story—one that sits at the crossroads of his Abenaki and European heritage. From the foot of Glass Factory Mountain to the halls of Cornell University, from a classroom in West Africa to a start-up literary magazine in a room of his grandfather’s home, Bruchac superimposes Native American ways of seeing upon the structure of today’s world. Bruchac believes the essential wisdom of native cultures, the balance of nature, and the power of a well-told story each holds ways to avoid humanity’s most destructive impulses.