The quest to find the father he never knew–the architect father who mysteriously disappeared after returning from the war in Vietnam–leads Charlie Cadwell, unexpectedly, to a utopian architectural experiment hidden away on a white-water river in the Pacific Northwest. Even more startling than the reason for his father’s disappearance is Charlie’s discovery that the architectural experiment is inhabited by an ethereal young woman, Maggie Scott, who is haunted by the death of her own father, and his futile obsession with saving an endangered species of wild trout. Inexorably drawn into the architectural experiment as a way of courting the love of Maggie Scott, Charlie finds himself, at first, accidentally estranged from her affection, then gradually entangled with her in a quixotic effort to present and explain the architectural theory–at an international design competition–to the world. The tragedy this challenge precipitates is, ultimately, dramatically transcended by the architecture itself.