GritLine Stories: Hard Country: Eight Stories of Work, Weather, and Wide Open Land

Every story in this collection touches the same stop - Hard Country, County Road 9, mile marker 40 - the way every life out here eventually touches a two-lane road.A son drives his father's truck three hundred miles home and finds the man's hat still hanging by the register. A welder sells the last machine in a shop that outlasted his trade, then bolts the vise down in a barn. A rider takes a wet mountain pass because a clinic on the other side has no backup. Two old friends fish a lake that keeps getting lower and finally say the thing they have not said in three years. A crop duster walks the field that grounded her before she trusts the air again. A woman running three thousand acres sells twenty head late and hires the math she cannot do alone. A bridge inspector closes a span eleven thousand cars a day still want to use. A driller stands by a twelfth well that might, for once, be the one.You do not have to have read one story to understand another. You just have to know the kind of place that keeps its lights on all night for people who need somewhere to be.Eight independent stories. One stretch of country.Companion to the coloring book GritLine: Hard Country.