Carol Mogensen begins a chronicle of her nomadic life by describing her family's wandering from one Texas oil boom town to another during the 1940s. These wanderings over the dry Texas plains instilled in her a thirst for adventure and led to living in Puerto Rico and, ultimately, on a small island in Alaska. She titles her book Riffraff as that is the way many residents of the small Texas farming communities whee cotton fields sat stop oil fields viewed the influx of nomadic oilfield workers into their communities. Although some may consider her early years a hard scrabble existence, she describes a childhood of being led into mischief by an older brother with humor. Other stories describe the experience of being the first woman to parachute with Sky Divers in Potter County in 1960, a car trip through Mexico in 1961 with her college roommate, an unpleasant incident at the notorious Jack Ruby's nightclub in Dallas, the pathos of loss of a loved one to suicide, and starting a new life with a new love in southeast Alaska, delivering supplies to remote island locations.