At age 49, San Francisco businessman MacDonald "Mac" Coyote nearly loses his life when he lands in the hospital with severe high blood sugar. The doctors diagnose him with diabetes and only through the miracle of modern medicine does he survive. But when he realizes he's been given a second chance, Mac discovers that he has the will to do the impossible-what the Greeks call Pleonexia-and he's going to leave his high-end lifestyle for something better. Over his wife's objections, they and their dog move out of the city and homestead thirty acres in California's High Sierra wilderness. The next few months bring encounters with bureaucracy, inept and hostile workers, blizzards, and forest fires as Mac's flatlander dream turns into a nightmare. He publishes a book of poems to great reviews and negligible sales, but he also grows cynical and grouchy. Maybe the impossible really is impossible. Mac wants to give up and move back to the city, but his wife loves their little cabin in the forest and refuses to leave. It's during a one-hundred year flood that Mac manages to pull off a miracle in the finest tradition of magic realism and discovers what it's truly like to be alive.