When his third wife abandons him in Tucson, boozing, misantrophic anarchist Henry Holyoak Lightcap shoots his refrigerator and sets off in a battered pick-up truck for his ancestral home in West Virginia. Accompanied only by his dying dog and his memories, the irascible individualist begins a bizarre cross-country odyssey - determined to make peace with his past ... and to wage one last war against the ravages of "progress."