In a remote cabin above California's Big Sur coast, Roger Nall lights a candle and kneels before his paperback copy of the I Ching. His potter girlfriend Sharon, slumbering nearby, is pregnant. They've talked about having their baby here in the cabin-alone, without electricity, unassisted. It occurs to Roger to consult the ancient Chinese Book of Change for a Confucian augury. The year is 1968. Roger writes poetry while living on savings from his pre-Vietnam Navy service. To him, "natural" childbirth is a romantic and philosophical choice. In his own eyes he's "a bearded recluse with his hippie woman resolutely scorning all the frou-frou of civilization, determinedly celebrating the joys of rusticity according to the great American transcendentalist tradition." When it comes to childbirth, he maintains, millennia of human history prove "Nature is perfectly capable of blipping a baby out of the womb without any fourth-party interference." Sharon agrees. She's been encouraged by a Berkeley friend who gave birth at home using only an emergent breathing technique for pain control called the Lamaze method. Sharon is young, vigorous, healthy and brave. She is as committed as Roger to the organic life. Roger tosses the coins to derive the fateful l Ching symbol. It's a set of six broken and unbroken lines-yin and yang-labeled CHUN. This hexagram, he reads to his dismay, stands for "DIFFICULTY." But he finds a hopeful coda in the explanatory text. "If we heed the omens," it promises-and there will be no lack of them when Sharon goes into labor-"our success is assured...."