The film recounts the 80 years of the life of Robert Grainier around
Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Arriving in the area on the
Great Northern Railway as an orphaned child, Robert drops out of school and spends his younger years without direction or purpose, until he meets Gladys Olding. They marry, build a log cabin along the
Moyie River, and have a daughter, Kate. Robert takes to railroad construction for the
Spokane International Railway. There he witnesses a
Chinese worker thrown from a bridge by a group of white workers for unclear reasons, which gives him continually haunting visions of the man and dreams of him being struck by a train. Robert later takes up seasonal logging work, but it takes him away from Gladys and Kate for long periods of time. Robert meets many men who leave impressions on him, but he also witnesses more tragedies along the way. One worker is killed by a
vigilante avenging the murder of his brother; several other workers are killed by a falling tree, their graves marked by pairs of boots nailed to trees. Robert grows close to a fellow logger, Arn Peeples, who is severely injured by a
falling branch, and then dies a few days later. Although Robert tries to take up work closer to home, he faces struggles in the post-World War I economy. He and Gladys decide to farm and build a lumber mill so he can stop logging. However, when Robert returns from his final season of logging he discovers the cabin destroyed in a wildfire, with Gladys and Kate missing. Despondent, his friend Ignatius Jack gives him company, then he rebuilds the cabin. As Robert returns to logging, he becomes out of place amid new technology and younger, rougher men, so he decides to stop. Taking a job as a carriage driver for townspeople, Robert meets Claire Thompson of the
United States Forest Service who is in town to conduct a survey, and encourages him. He continually walks through the woods, believing he can feel the spirits of his wife and daughter sometimes, and hopes not to drive them away; Claire in turn tells him how her husband died after a long illness. One night, Robert believes he sees an injured Kate apparently return to the cabin and he tends to her wounds, then plays with baby Kate by the river. However, after a night of dreams he awakens to find her gone and a window open. He determines to continue living in the cabin in case she ever returns. Years go by, and the world changes around an aging and weathered Robert, who rides the
Great Northern into
Spokane, witnessing
John Glenn's
flight into space on a television. The film ends on a spring day when Robert decides to fly in a
biplane. As the plane loops and circles in the air, sights and sounds of people and places throughout his life pass through his mind. The narrator recounts that Robert died in his sleep in the cabin in November 1968, leaving no heirs, but that on that spring day in the plane, "as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all." ==Cast==