Challenged in his academic career and beset in his personal life, Ed Cooper takes a sabbatical from university teaching, departs Washington D.C., and retreats to a farm in rural Maryland to complete his great work, a treatise that will rattle the foundations of social science. The pastoral tranquility he anticipates is elusive, however, and, yet struggling with emanations from the Vietnam War, he becomes enmeshed in the lives of his hosts, their present, their past, and the future of their farm and their agricultural community, threatened by encroaching suburbia.