Soda Springs is the forgotten story of America's turbulent civil rights years: the fictional world of a small farm town fragmented by the Mexican-American struggle to combat decades of racism. Soda Springs confronts those topics your mother told you to steer clear of in polite company: sex . . . religion . . . politics . . . racial conflict. April 1963. College senior Rick Sanders commits himself to Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. But when Rick's father rolls his tractor, Rick begrudgingly returns to Soda Springs, Colorado, to run the family farm. He vows to make the best of it: he will enlighten the hometown folks with Dr. King's message. Rick discovers a town in the throes of a failing economy, and finds himself in the cross hairs of warring factions governed by hardball politics. He plunges headfirst into a world of prejudice, discrimination, protest, and violence. His reward: shattered dreams, love, sex, rejection, and finally, redemption.

An evocative memoir of growing up in the rural town of Soda Springs, Idaho, describes life in the dilapidated if historic Enders Hotel, Caf, and Bar, the colorful and and haunted characters who passed through its doors, and the author's own struggle to find his own identity in the faces of a never-seen father and desperate boarders. Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. Original.