Highway 20

HIGHWAY 20Something has gone wrong with America. Not catastrophically, not all at once. The way a system fails: slowly, then faster than anyone was ready for.Clare Reeves spent twelve years as a transit analyst writing reports about exactly this. She named the dependencies, mapped the failure points, filed the binders. None of it was wrong. None of it was enough. Now she is leaving Boston in a working truck with a former long-haul driver she met once, headed for a sister she hasn't seen in years, at the western end of the longest road in the country.US Route 20 runs 3,365 miles from Boston to the Oregon coast. It threads through every town the nation ever strung together, and the country it passes through now is not collapsed so much as reconfiguring. Local currencies backed by the businesses that honor them. Diners that feed people who can't pay, under signs that explain the policy without apology. Checkpoint officers running intelligence on their brothers two states over. The wrongnesses arrive small and accumulate, which is more unsettling than ruin would be. Clare has spent her career modeling this transition. The territory turns out to be stranger, harder, and more stubbornly alive than any model.The man driving the truck knows the road the way you know something you have lived inside for thirty years. What he is becomes clear over the miles, the way things become clear when two people cross ten time zones together with nowhere else to be.A story about competence under pressure, the long distance between knowing and doing, and what it means to stop writing the report and drive the territory instead. About a country in pieces, and the people deciding, one at a time, to hold the pieces together. About the road that runs to the edge of the continent, and what is waiting at the end of it.The work goes on.

Pagina's: 594, Paperback, Independently published