Same Ground: Chasing Family Down the California Gold Rush Trail

An award-winning author goes looking for the meaning of family and belonging on a glorious wild-goose-chase road trip across middle America.

A personal tale of parallel journeys separated by almost two centuries - by car, in Wangersky’s case, and on mule and foot in the case of his great-great-grandfather William Castle Dodge.

Wangersky’s great-great-grandfather crossed the continent in search of gold in 1849. William Castle Dodge was his name, and he was 22 years old. He wrote a diary of that eventful journey that comes into the author’s hands 160 years later. And typically, quixotically, Wangersky decides to follow Dodge’s westward trail across the great bulging middle of America, not in search of gold but something even less likely: that elusive thing called family.

What ensues becomes this story, by turns hilarious and profound, about a very long trip - by car, in Wangersky’s case, and on mule and foot in Dodge’s. Interweaving his experiences on the road with Dodge’s diary, the author contemplates the human need to hunt for roots and meaning as he - and Dodge - encounter immigrants who risk everything to be somewhere else, while only glimpsing those who are there already and who want to hold onto their claim in the stream of human migration.

Same Ground is a story about what time washes away and what persists - and what we might find, unexpectedly, if we go looking.

‘Read him.’ - George Elliott Clarke, author of I & I and George and Rue