Bette Stoll has to intuit her own way. Born a middle child in a troubled family, neglected and lonely after the death of her grandmother when she is only seven, she takes comfort riding her horse alone in the virgin woods on her father's Michigan farm. When in 1957 his mental breakdown transplants the family to Southern California, they join a national migration West. Bette, a naive farm girl, is dropped at the onset of adolescence into the wild circus...