Jack's life begins in Ireland in 1980 and ends in Oregon (now part of Cascadia) in 2080. He helped some friends lob a mortar round into a British army barracks in Derry, so the IRA got him out of town with a job on a cruise ship. He jumped ship in New York, married a girl he met on the ship and headed west. They rehabbed houses in Chicago, lived through the great oil crash in South Dakota, then migrated to Oregon. The story goes from past to future and traces the end of an empire and a new way of living on earth.