Drew MacLaren remembers the summers of 1958 and 1959 in the Outer Banks more clearly than any in his life-the months when super heroes streaked across the pages of comic books, and the hurricane winds of Big Leo ripped cottages from their pilings, when Clarisse Silver went violently insane, and his best friend, Maggie, was accused of murdering her mother. On a gray, windy afternoon Drew secretly watches Maggie Silver crying. He listens, terrified, as a voice shrieks inside her cottage and dishes of oatmeal shatter against the wall. He knows nothing about his neighbor, only, like all children instinctively do, that the she is poor and older than he is. He knows that her brother, Skeeter, has had polio and rolls around their porches on a low board with caster wheels. But from the moment he sees her smile rise up through her tears, he becomes determined to learn more of who she is. And from that smile, the adventure of his life begins.

The dramatic story of several generations of cavers whose exciting and dangerous explorations in Kentucky's limestone labyrinths culminated in the big connection between the Flint Ridge Cave System and Mammoth Cave, forming the longest cave in the world.