All the Way to Second Street

By Nancy Casey

It's 1980 and Nancy is 28 years old, the perfect Catholic girl, living in a suburb of Detroit, doing what she is told. Her life has been a series of academic honors, followed by a dress-for-success career, and marriage to a man that everyone loves. Yet she feels trapped and wants more. She moves out of her brick house and heads west. In Boulder, Colorado, she meets Robb, an artist and writer. They move to Idaho and join the back-to-the land movement.

Her family condemns her. Her friends shake their heads. She vows to write down every detail so they will understand the importance of embracing radical simplicity and perhaps join her.

This is a chronicle of survival skills and personal growth, an odyssey through the unexpected. Through the voice of Nancy's journal and letters, we visit a little-examined period in Idaho history, when hippies were moving to the hills. We stay with her until she lands in a small house on Second Street, a single mother, in an Idaho town.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 193720300X
• ISBN13: 9781937203009
• Release Date: August 2011
• Publisher: Logwood Stone
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Bittersweet tale echoing the contradictions and deceptions of the countercultural forces of the 1970

This memoir by Nancy Casey (1952- ) is a bittersweet tale echoing the contradictions and deceptions of the countercultural forces of the 1970s. Her conflicted life really accelerated upon her walkout from her first husband “Dominic” who was actually a decent mid-American lawyer type heartily approved by her family and friends. (Her precise reasons for doing so are never explained.) She then hooks up with “Robb”, a silver-tongued and drug-addled idol from the counterculture she fantasized about joining. They finally settle in Idaho where the back-to-the-land 1980s hippie movement is in full swing. She soon bears two children with her unstable paramour, believing they can raise them civilly while divorced from the rest of society. Predictably, Robb becomes quite abusive and downright dangerous, and Nancy divorces him. She supports herself as a teacher and writer of diverse and progressive opinions, many of which terrify fellow Idahoans. Antagonist “Robb” later found a third wife and became the provocative and controversial “Redneck Socialist” writer later noted for his anti-capitalist, anti-American writings. He died of cancer in 2011. Early on Nancy abandoned her cradle Catholicism yet was incapable of replacing it with any alternate moral compass. Her parents symbolized that faith connection and were her last warning signal as to the disaster she was creating. In retrospect, they ironically stand out as the real (but unintended) heroes of her story. The bitter fruits of a deep-seated sociopathy leak through Casey’s pages—a compendium of diaries and letters, sometimes intense and graphic, scrupulously maintained over the years. But the unrealized potential of a gifted yet tormented soul grieves the compassionate reader. Read Nancy Casey’s tale only if you earnestly want to learn how easy it is to wreck your precious life and never look back.