The wife had been offered a one-year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont, and the husband was married to the wife.
They had two children, a son and a daughter. The plan was for the husband to finish the first draft of his dissertation, which he had been working on for fourteen years, twelve years longer than intended. But a week before they departed, they read an article describing the “childcare deserts” of rural America, so he knew deep down in his heart that he would be watching their kids.
The truth was that he already knew this, because this is what had happened at their home in the city, which was not a childcare desert. But the college was prestigious, an exciting opportunity for the family, an adventure.
And he loved deserts! As a boy, he had been to the Grand Canyon, and kept a “Creatures of the Southwest” poster on his wall.
*
They had driven there from California, because of the dog, whom they couldn’t bear to put in cargo.
In the beginning, the dog sat in the back, between the two children. They had cleared a spot. By Sacramento, the spot was needed for a box of Goldfish crackers the size of the daughter, and the dog had hopped over the divide and settled in the husband’s lap, where it remained. It was assertive and warm, with warm, cadaveric breath, and each time the husband tried to move it, it adopted a posture of such defiant deadweight that he felt as if he were lifting a dog-shaped bag of water. At night, in the motel showers, he could still see the imprint of its talons on his legs.
The wife reminded him that the correct word was “paw,” not a difficult word to remember.
The dog was a breed called a Lagotto Romagnolo, from Italy, which the husband was always embarrassed to share, because it sounded like a luxury sports car, while the truth was the dog had cost the same as every other dog during the pandemic, but it was the first hypoallergenic dog to come off waiting lists in California, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho. Every other dog was taken. The family had written pleading letters, sat for interviews, submitted videos of their home, videos of their children, and each time they had been rejected by the cabal of profiteering breeders who saw that time of suffering as a moment to assert their superiority over desperate, allergic professionals homebound with their kids.
They had named the dog Giuseppe, after Arcimboldo, after Garibaldi, after Verdi, to honor his Italian roots.
Their son had discovered the breed on the Internet during Zoom school. In addition to not shedding, it had the virtue of being bred for truffle hunting, which meant that at least one member of the family would have a useful skill when society broke down. In online forums, the dog was praised for its gentleness and soft fur and interesting coloration, which changed as it got older, though some people cautioned that unless you really intended it to hunt truffles, what you were buying was an animal genetically selected to go crazy over secret, pungent morsels of which humans were blissfully unaware.
*
When the wife had received the offer to teach, she was also offered housing in the Visiting Faculty Residence, which on the website of the college appeared to be a light-filled modern structure, with basketball and tennis courts, and a playground, just on the edge of campus. It seemed, in fact, almost identical to their California faculty apartment, though when the husband studied the photo on the webpage more closely, he noticed that all the cars were twenty years old. This was the first warning sign. The second warning sign was an actual warning, from the grad-school friend who had helped arrange the invitation: under no terms should they ever stay in the Visiting Faculty Residence, which had been built by an avant-garde Colombian architect, very famous, revolutionary. As in the tropical country Colombia, she added. As in the one without a winter. The year before, a Finnish scholar had suffered frostbite in her bedroom. As in the Arctic country Finland, she said.
This struck the wife and husband as hyperbolic. Every university had its history of architectural tragedy. How bad could it really get? And the wife, whose California office had beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows that had been blocked, in the seventies, by a four-foot-high “brise-soleil” of concrete, thought for a bit, as did the husband, who had to ascend three floors from his basement office to reach a bathroom with urinals arranged in a rosette to foster creativity and communication. But what were they to do?
Their friend set out to find who might be on sabbatical, and after some inquiries, they received an email from a professor of economics. What fortune! He was looking for a house sitter. And he wouldn’t charge them anything; he needed someone to look after the place, to watch for leaks, to keep the animals away.
Such generosity, not to mention the casual animal reference, should have been a warning, but for simple city people, it was not.
*
And so they set out. The wife drove, and the husband, who already had a few moving violations, sat under the dog. In the back were the boy, the girl, the Goldfish crackers, and a pair of potholder looms, gifts from the wife’s mother.
For the husband, the appeal of a potholder loom had remained one of the durable mysteries of parenthood; part of him was proud that, in an age of all-consuming electronic media and dwindling attention spans, his very bright nine-year-old child could be occupied for hours making potholders, though he was less certain about his twelve-year-old. But the loom kept the children occupied until Nebraska, when the seven bags of vibrant multicolored loops ran out. “Look at the view,” said the wife, when the kids began to complain, though there was no view—it wasn’t that it was monotonous or featureless, or whatever the unimaginative coastal elite might say about the landscape of the extraordinary American heartland, just that the highway had been embedded in said heartland in such a way that they could see nothing but ten feet of grassy verge, for hundreds of miles. They could not agree on a podcast, the books were in the trunk, and although the husband could have climbed back over the seats under normal circumstances, now there was the dog. So the husband told them a story.
*
The story was one of many stories the husband had encountered in graduate school, where over the past fourteen years his dissertation topic had drifted—geographically, chronologically, thematically. He’d begun with an obscure troubadour, taken three years to learn that he was obscure for a reason, switched to Rabelais without telling his adviser, then the body in Rabelais, then monsters in Rabelais, then monsters in French folktales, each great fun, but none of which led anywhere concrete. It might have been pathetic had he not loved the books, the stories, the paths they took him down, the laughter, outsized and impossible. But time was ticking. By then his first adviser had died; his second seemed to have forgotten he existed. Well, perhaps Western Europe was the problem! And, following a year brushing up on college Russian, and another spent falling in love with Chekhov’s early humor, he was ready to begin again, when his son, age three, discovered Thomas the Tank Engine. All of a sudden, trains were everywhere. How had he never noticed? Could trains in Chekhov be his topic? It was a rich one, and it would give him and the boy a new shared interest. But Tolstoy’s use of trains was even richer—lethally so—and trains led to train stations, and train stations led to rural train stations, led to rural life, and nothing was as magnificent as Tolstoy’s depictions of haying, mushrooming, and beekeeping, and by then his son was on to
Legos.
But bees! And hay! Reading Tolstoy, he could almost smell it. So, again, he changed his dissertation, to the world of Tolstoy’s peasants, where he had remained for a full two years, reading Russian folktales as background, before deciding that Russian folktale peasants might be an easier topic, compared with such a famous author who had written such long books.
That was how he got to where he was. Once upon a time. Or, as they said in Russian folktales: In a certain kingdom, in a certain land.
*
Since they were going to a new house, in a faraway forest, the story that the husband decided to tell his children was the Russian classic “Vasilisa the Fair,” leaving out the parts about Vasilisa’s stepmother sending her into the dark woods where the witch Baba Yaga lived in a hut that stood on chicken legs behind a fence of human bones. The story therefore was considerably shorter, and not entirely coherent, but at least it took them to Omaha, where the tornado warnings began.
*
The wife, in contrast to the husband, had a flourishing academic career: a book on Blake, two books on Milton, tenure at thirty-two, a full professorship at thirty-nine. She taught popular courses, which, according to her end-of-term teaching evaluations, were “super fun, and interesting!,” “probably not usful [sic] for a job, but still mind-blowing,” and had “great readings, especially The Book of Urizen,” her favorite evaluation ever, since The Book of Urizen was really hard—impenetrable for the nonspecialist, really—and hadn’t been assigned. She was a rarity at the University, a place that had abandoned itself so completely to the promises of technology that her students studying biology (and not, say, bioengineering) were considered crazy, wasteful hippies and looked upon with pity by their peers.
Over the past decade, watching their course enrollments dwindle, her colleagues had been forced to pander, changing “English 7: Shakespeare” to “Sex in Shakespeare”; “English 28: Middlemarch” to “Learning Programming from Middlemarch (a Novel)”; and “Comp Lit 111: Russian Masters” to “ ‘Look What You Made Me Do’: Fyodor (Dostoyevsky) and Taylor (Swift).” But not the wife. She was no-frills. She was hardcore. She called her classes simply: “Milton.” “Blake.” If you needed first names, perhaps you should take another class.
But few, after her first lecture, took another class. Students told her every quarter that her lectures made them cry, made them believe in humanity again.
*
Since we are on the topic, the husband’s course reviews—not his own courses, mind you, but courses for which he labored as a teaching assistant at less than minimum wage—said that he was “nice,” if “sometimes hard to follow,” and that he got “caught up in arcane topics, so that a lecture on Turgenev would somehow end in Ecuador.” Once, someone wrote that he was “disheveled, not in a gross way, in a nice way”; another wrote, “My friend S—— had a crush on him, which we thought was funny,” and “Sometimes it’s a trip just to watch him go on and on, even if you lost him long ago.” Also, he was “easily manipulated,” “gullible,” and “always granted extensions.” There was no need to make up a complex story about a sick grandparent; you just needed to ask.
*
They had originally intended the journey as a vacation, and so they took a scenic route. The route was a compromise hammered out among all interested parties. Everyone made sacrifices. The wife was promised a visit to the National Willa Cather Center; the son secured three children’s science museums; and the daughter, who worshipped her mother, also chose the National Willa Cather Center.
Both parents, while secretly finding this charming, said the daughter could choose something of her own, something for children. After some time on the Internet with her brother, she chose the Kids’ Room at the National Willa Cather Center. As for the husband, he was allowed to choose the route generally, which he mapped out with precision to avoid places overrun with tourists at the peak of the American summer.
The route took in twenty-seven states, eighteen important wildlife areas, a national park no one had ever heard of, forests in states popularly conceived of as having no forests, and a rare mountaintop oasis in the middle of Nevada known only to hunters of bighorn sheep. It was to take three weeks, but after a day beneath the dog, the husband quietly suggested that they take the interstate.
*
In the end, all parties agreed that, tornadoes excepted, a highlight of the trip was a Comfort Inn just outside Huron, Ohio.
They had seen the sign from the highway. They were exhausted, and two nights supporting local B&Bs had done a number even on the children’s backs. It would not hurt, said the wife, to indulge one night at a known establishment, with corporate standards. That Comfort Inn was considered an indulgence was a testament to the forbearance and devotion of the wife, a woman of beauty and intelligence, who could have chosen any number of wealthy suitors.
There were only two cars in the parking lot. The reception area was empty, or seemed to be empty, for when they approached the desk, they saw a woman so tiny that she might have been a child. Her frizzy hair was white and coaxed into a pair of pigtails, and on her little nose sat a pair of tiger-striped frames. She was dressed in a bright-teal jumpsuit made of parachute cloth, and each of her fingernails was painted a different color.
The husband lifted the daughter up, just so she could see this wondrous woman. The son, just tall enough to see over the counter, stood between his parents. He had lived a sheltered life, but had read enough books to know that flagrantly eccentric characters often served as gatekeepers to danger.
He looked to his father as if to ask, did his parents know what they were doing?
His father answered with an expression that answered, We got this, little buddy. It was only then that he looked up and saw that the “Com” in “Comfort” had been painted over.
The woman’s voice was very low and rough, but not like a smoker’s voice, rather the voice of a sexy singer, and both husband and wife asked a few superfluous questions just to listen to this voice. In this voice, the woman explained that, by agreeing to stay there for the night, the family understood that Fort Inn had nothing to do with Comfort Inn, from which it had recently separated after an acrimonious dispute prompted by oppressive rules enforcing a conformity that was creating a crushing monoculture across not only the hospitality industry, but—given the central role of travel in the American imaginary landscape—national, and even international, life.
They understood. They were ready to be off the road. And who didn’t want to stay in a replica frontier fort, with running water and TV/cable, real rifles everywhere, stuffed bears the size of real bears, a vibrating coin-operated bed shaped like a stagecoach, walls covered with real bark to replicate a log cabin of early-nineteenth-century Ohio? Who wouldn’t want that? And of course she allowed pets; didn’t the frontier allow pets?
*
It was six hundred miles from the Fort Inn to the college. Now the husband and the wife took turns at the wheel. Drive-thru restaurants beckoned and received them, the sun passed overhead just west of Buffalo, and they resisted the road signs to Niagara Falls, vaguely proud that they were a family who could resist the tacky, sunburnt crowds and criminal tour-operators awaiting them. Niagara was a bit too obvious, wasn’t it? And hadn’t they just seen the falls in a painting at The Cleveland Museum of Art?
Instead, they stopped to rest at Akron Falls, just a few miles north of the highway, which was far less crowded. There was a nature trail, barbecue pits, and an interpretive center (closed), while two women shouting at each other provided local color. And the dog loved it, for he found something extraordinary in an overturned trash can, and managed to down it on the run, with all four humans in pursuit.
*
Since they had decided to spend a year in the country, each member of the family had found themselves daydreaming, and, over four months, had come to imagine what life would be like.
The daughter’s fantasy drew heavily from Laura Ingalls Wilder: a homestead racked by malaria and Indian war cries; also, cute lambs, cozy fires, homemade dolls, and fresh warm cow’s milk they would serve a cat, a rescue. It would be the daughter’s job to milk the cows, who would come to know her and love her more than her brother, as would the cat.
The son, in turn, was the most skeptical of the group, having recently entered the natural developmental stage in children characterized by distrust of everything, which in his case had been amplified by YouTube videos he’d watched during the pandemic, placing him on that fascinating threshold at which healthy skepticism tips vertiginously into paranoia. This had been further encouraged by a series of fantasy novels called Child Rebellion, in which it was revealed that the amnesia of early life is not a biological fact but, rather, a brainwashing, carried out by a conspiracy of sterile adults who controlled a vast trade in children, and that the “de-brainwashed” could in fact remember their lives up to the opening of “the curtain” (childbirth), and so uncover their real parents among the hordes of “breeders” housed in giant feedlots across the American Midwest.
As a practical matter, the trip across the country (specifically, the Midwest) might allow him the chance to gather evidence. He was also excited about archery and wood carving. His father had even bought him a bow and a pocketknife, which on balance was probably evidence against the Child Rebellion hypothesis, unless his father was one of the secret allies of the Rebellion, and deliberately arming him.
The mother’s fantasies were mostly pedagogical: she imagined a true liberal-arts institution, where students came to learn and only to learn, to read Blake and Milton not because they were distributional requirements on the way to computer-engineering degrees but because they thrilled at the foreign but familiar syntax, the otherworldly theology, the imagery rivaling even the greatest Marvel enterprise. They did not care for grades, and the thought that they would ask a humanist who lived in a tiny campus apartment for a letter of recommendation to help secure a $150,000 starting job in investment banking never would have crossed their minds. For who, in that bucolic paradise, had heard of investment banking, of management consulting, of private equity? She would hold classes beneath the golden trees of autumn, before log fires in the student commons in winter, and among the flowers of spring. She wouldn’t even require the papers; students would submit them out of sheer intellectual joy. In this way, she lived in a world more fantastical than the son.
The husband, in addition to finally finishing his dissertation, imagined himself a farmer, a gardener, a grower of apples and peaches, his practical knowledge of which involved the weekly farmers’ market in downtown Menlo Park, a tomato plant on their campus-housing balcony, and the beekeeping scenes in Anna Karenina.
As for Giuseppe, when the winds were blowing from the east, he could smell the farms and forests that awaited and so, among the family members, was the only one who truly knew the future.
__________________________________
From Country People by Daniel Mason. Copyright © 2026 by Daniel Mason. Published by Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
