John Treadwell Nichols

Boom times came to the forgotten little southwestern town of Chamisaville just as the rest of America was in the Great Depression. They came when a rattletrap bus loaded with stolen dynamite blew sky-high, leaving behind a giant gushing hot spring. Within minutes, the town's wheeler-dealer's had organized, and with a year, Chamisaville was flooded with tourists and pilgrims, and the wheeler-dealers were rich.

A funny and pathetic account of the beginning and end of an offbeat love affair between two crazy but appealing college kids.

Jonathan Kepler wants to climb Spoon Mountain with his grown son and daughter on his sixty-fifth birthday in three weeks. The kids, Ben and Miranda, think he's crazy. For starters, Spoon Mountain is almost the tallest alpine peak in New Mexico. Jonathan's health is terrible. Still reeling from his third, nearly fatal, divorce, he has a rotten heart, serious asthma, and a fed-up girlfriend who is about to drop him like a bad habit. Once a celebrated...

"John Nichols was raised among naturalists and nurtured by a family as American as the Stars and Stripes. His great (times five) grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence for New York State. Nichols sailed happily through a top-notch private school education and sold his first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, a best-seller, at age twenty-three. He considered himself "a child blessed by the culture and fated for delirious success." But then a short...