Twenty five years after the major mistake of their lives, their failure to marry each other, Samuel and Louise leave their day-to-day worlds to spend two weeks camping in the Adirondack wilderness. Louise seeks a responsible way out of her dead marriage; Samuel hopes to end his years as a lonely bachelor wandering from job to job. Both are teachers, she in their hometown high school in Illinois, he at a university in St. Petersburg, Russia. They share a genuine concern for the coming generation, in America, and in Russia. Louise looks forward toward the personal; Samuel envisions the global. She searches for the courage to free herself from her old way of life. Equally important, she wants her son and daughter to find happiness in marriage, rather than to repeat her failure. She dreads the death of her parents, whose values seem far stronger than those of her own generation. Having lived her life in the heartland, she demands that America live up to its potential. Samuel dreams of a global renaissance. If Russia and America are going to progress from the battlefields of the twentieth century to a stable and productive peace in the twenty-first, then both school and family need to reach beyond their traditional limits. His belief is not in one nation, nor in one system, but in the kids of the world. The love between the two flames is finally able to kindle anew. Nurtured by the spirit of the wilderness, warmed by a late-night campfire, Samuel and Louise fulfil an ancient dream.