The wife had been offered a yearlong 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, a project he had been at for fourteen years, twelve years longer than he had meant to commit. Yet a week before their departure they read an article about the “childcare deserts” in rural America, and he understood, with a heavy clarity, that he would be the one watching the children.
The truth, in fact, was that he already knew this, because this was what had happened at their urban home, which did not suffer from a childcare shortage. But the college represented prestige, a thrilling opportunity for the family, an adventure worth taking.
And deserts delighted him! He had always loved the idea of the desert—grown up with memories of the Grand Canyon and a poster labeled “Creatures of the Southwest” hanging on his wall.
*
They had traveled from California for the dog, whom they could not bear to ship in cargo.
At the start, the dog rested in the rear, tucked between the two children. They had cleared a space. By the halfway point in California, that space had to be sacrificed for a box of Goldfish crackers as big as their daughter, and the dog had leapt over the seat divider and claimed the husband’s lap, where it stayed. It was pushy and warm, with a scent of something nearly lifeless, and each time the husband tried to shift it, the dog bent into a posture of stubborn weight that made him feel he was hoisting a dog-shaped bag of water. At night, in hotel showers, he could still feel the claws pressed into his legs.
The wife reminded him that the correct word was “paw,” not a tough term to recall.
The dog was a Lagotto Romagnolo, an Italian breed the husband kept quiet about sharing because it sounded like a flashy sports car, even though the dog had cost the same as any other canine during the plague year. It was the first hypoallergenic pup to break onto waiting lists in several states. Every other dog had been taken. The family had sent earnest letters, sat for interviews, and submitted home videos, only to be rejected by a cabal of breeders who saw a moment of collective hardship as an excuse to flaunt their superiority over parents stuck at home with kids.
They named the dog Giuseppe, in honor of Arcimboldo, Garibaldi, and Verdi, to celebrate his Italian lineage.
Their son had found the breed online during Zoom school. Besides not shedding, the dog had the virtue of being bred to hunt truffles, so someone in the family would possess a useful skill if society collapsed. In online forums, the dog was praised for its gentleness, silky fur, and changing coat as it aged; some warned, though, that unless you truly planned to hunt for truffles, you were effectively buying an animal bred to go bonkers for these pungent treats that humans barely acknowledged.
*
When the wife received the teaching offer, she was also offered housing in the Visiting Faculty Residence, which the college’s site depicted as a bright, modern complex with sports courts and a playground, perched on the edge of campus. It seemed, in fact, almost identical to their California faculty apartment, though the husband studied the photo more closely and noticed all the cars were two decades old. This was the first warning. The second warning came in an actual warning from a grad-school friend who had helped arrange the invitation: under no circumstances should they stay in the Visiting Faculty Residence, which had been built by a renowned avant-garde Colombian architect—“in the tropics,” she added, “the winters are nonexistent.” The year before, a Finnish scholar had frostbite in her bedroom. As in Finland, she said.
This struck the couple as hyperbolic. Every university carried its own history of architectural misfires. How bad could it be? And the wife, whose California office boasted floor-to-ceiling windows blocked in the seventies by a four-foot concrete screen, pondered for a moment, while the husband—who had to climb three flights from his basement office to reach a bathroom with a rosette of urinals—assessed the risks. But what could they do?
Their friend began to look for someone who might be on sabbatical, and after some inquiries they received an email from a professor of economics. What luck! He needed a house sitter, and would not charge a thing; he simply required someone to watch the place, check for leaks, and keep the animals away.
Such generosity, not to mention the casual animal reference, should have warned them, but for city dwellers it was not a red flag.
*
And so they set off. The wife drove, while the husband—already prone to minor traffic violations—sat under the dog. The boy, the girl, the Goldfish crackers, and a pair of potholder looms—gifts from the wife’s mother—rounded out the back seat.
For the husband, the potholder loom remained one of parenthood’s more stubborn mysteries; a part of him took pride that, in an era of digital consumption and shrinking attention spans, his bright nine-year-old could spend hours weaving potholders, though the twelve-year-old sometimes worried him. Yet the loom kept them occupied until Nebraska, when all seven bags of vividly colored loops finally ran dry. “Look at the view,” the wife suggested when the children began to complain, though the highway offered nothing but ten feet of grassy verge for miles on end. They could not agree on a podcast, the books were in the trunk, and though the husband could have wriggled back over the seats under normal circumstances, the dog prevented that. So he began to tell a story.
*
The tale was one of many the husband had collected during graduate school, where his dissertation topic kept shifting—geography, time, and theme morphing almost yearly. He started with a lesser-known troubadour, realized after three years that obscurity might be its own explanation, and moved on to Rabelais without informing his advisor, then the body in Rabelais, then monsters in Rabelais, then monsters in French folklore, each joyous and intriguing, but none yielding a concrete path. It might have been pitiable if he didn’t love the books, the stories, and the detours. Time, however, pressed on. His first advisor had died; his second seemed to have forgotten him. Perhaps Western Europe was the problem. After a year brushing up on college Russian and another year falling for Chekhov’s early humor, he was ready to begin anew, when his son, then three, discovered Thomas the Tank Engine. Suddenly trains appeared everywhere. Could trains in Chekhov be his topic? It was a rich field, and it could offer the boy and him a shared pursuit. Yet Tolstoy’s trains were even richer—dangerously so—and trains led to stations, and stations led to rural stations, to rural life, and nothing was as grand as Tolstoy’s depictions of haying, mushrooming, and beekeeping, and by then the boy moved on to Legos.
Bees! And hay! Reading Tolstoy, he could almost smell it. So again he shifted to Tolstoy’s peasantry, spending two full years reading Russian folklore as background, before deciding that peasants in Russian folklore might be an easier path than tackling a towering author who had written quite long novels.
That was how he ended up where he was. Once upon a time. Or, as the Russian folktales would put it: In a certain kingdom, in a certain land.
*
Since they were crossing to a new house in a distant forest, the husband chose to tell the children the Russian classic “Vasilisa the Fair,” omitting the parts about Vasilisa’s stepmother unleashing Baba Yaga in a witch’s hut on chicken legs behind a fence of human bones. The tale was thus shorter and not perfectly cohesive, but it did carry them to Omaha, where the tornado warnings began to echo.
*
The wife, by contrast, thrived professionally: a book on Blake, two on Milton, tenure at thirty-two, and a full professorship at thirty-nine. She led courses that many evaluators called “super fun, and interesting,” “maybe not useful for a job, but still mind-bending,” with readings that included The Book of Urizen, her personal favorite for its difficulty—an assignment she never actually gave. She stood out at a university that had drifted toward technology, where her biology students looked on as hippies and wasteful dreamers, pitied by peers for pursuing humanistic study.
Over the last decade, course enrollments dwindled, and colleagues adapted by renaming classes: Shakespeare became “Sex in Shakespeare”; Middlemarch transformed into “Learning Programming from Middlemarch (a Novel)”; and “Russian Masters” turned into “Look What You Made Me Do: Fyodor (Dostoyevsky) and Taylor (Swift).” Yet she stayed as she was—no-nonsense, hardcore, and preferring simple titles: “Milton.” “Blake.” If you needed given names, perhaps you should enroll elsewhere.
Yet after the opening lecture, few returned for more. Students would later say her talks moved them to tears, restoring faith in humanity.
*
To be honest, the husband’s course evaluations were less flattering—lessons he poured into teaching assistant duties at scandalously low wages. They described him as “nice,” though “sometimes hard to follow,” prone to letting a lecture on Turgenev wander into Ecuador. One note joked about a crush on him by a friend, another described him as “disheveled, not in a gross way, but in a charming fashion.” Some called him “easily led,” “gullible,” and “often granted extensions.” There was no need for false illness or dramatic excuses; you simply asked, and you would learn the truth.
*
Originally, the plan for their journey was a vacation, so they charted a scenic route. It was a compromise among all involved. The wife would visit the National Willa Cather Center; the son would have access to three children’s science museums; the daughter, who adored her mother, opted for the center as well. The husband could pick the route in broad strokes, aiming to avoid tourist crowds at the height of summer.
Between them, they plotted twenty-seven states, eighteen major wildlife refuges, a national park little known to most, forests imagined as nonexistent in certain states, and a rare mountaintop oasis in Nevada that only a few big-hame enthusiasts knew. The trip would stretch over three weeks, but after a day with the dog on board, the husband proposed taking the interstate and cutting things short.
*
Ultimately, aside from the tornadoes, a standout moment of the journey became a Comfort Inn just outside Huron, Ohio.
They had spotted the sign along the highway and, exhausted, two nights in local B&Bs having affected the children’s spines, decided a night in a familiar chain hotel might be a kindness. That Comfort Inn felt indulgent, a testament to the wife’s patience and grace, a woman of beauty and intellect who could have chosen any number of wealthy suitors.
Only two cars occupied the lot. The lobby appeared empty until a tiny, almost childlike woman greeted them at the desk. Her frizzy white hair was pulled into two pigtails, and her bleached blue eyes wore tiger-striped frames. She wore a bright teal jumpsuit sewn from parachute fabric, with each fingernail painted a different color.
The husband picked up the daughter so she could glimpse this marvel. The son stood tall enough to see over the counter, aware of danger’s gatekeepers despite his sheltered upbringing. He looked to his father as if asking for reassurance. The father’s expression said, We’ve got this, kid. It was only then that he noticed the word “Com” had been painted over the “Comfort.”
The woman spoke with a voice low and rough, not from smoking but from a seductive singer’s timbre, and both parents asked a few unnecessary questions just to hear it again. In that voice, she explained that by agreeing to stay the night, they understood that the Fort Inn did not belong to Comfort Inn, from which it had recently parted after a dispute about rigid rules enforcing uniformity in an industry that shapes national and even global life through travel.
They accepted. They were ready to move on. And who wouldn’t at a frontier fort, with running water and television, rifles on display, bears stuffed to life-size, a bed shaped like a stagecoach that vibrated, walls lined with real bark to echo a log cabin from nineteenth-century Ohio? And yes, she permitted pets; did not frontier life always allow a pet?
*
From the Fort Inn, it was six hundred miles to the college. The husband and wife took turns behind the wheel. Drive-thru eateries beckoned, the sun climbed overhead just west of Buffalo, and they resisted detours toward Niagara Falls, feeling a sly pride in their ability to ignore the gleaming tourist pull and the operators who counted on it. Niagara’s lure felt a touch too obvious, after all they had already seen in a painting at The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Instead they paused at Akron Falls, a few miles from the highway, where the crowd was thinner. There was a nature trail, barbecue pits, and an interpretive center (closed), and two women shouting at each other added color to the scene. The dog delighted in a strange find in an overturned trash can and managed to swallow it before their feet could catch up.
*
With the decision to spend a year in the country, every family member began to dream differently, and over the next four months, each of them formed a private fantasy of life there.
The daughter’s dream borrowed from Laura Ingalls Wilder: a farmstead afflicted by malaria and tribal skirmishes, but also lambs, warm fires, handmade dolls, and fresh milk for a household cat and a rescue animal. It would be the daughter’s task to tend the cows, who would come to love her more than her brother, and the cat would be her companion as well.
The son, ever the skeptic, had entered a stage of life where doubt becomes a habit, a phase amplified by pandemic-era YouTube fare, where a fictional world of conspiracies suggested that early life amnesia wasn’t biological but a deliberate erasure by an elite of “breeders” who ran a vast system across the Midwest. He found the idea both alarming and strangely exciting, and his thoughts turned to gathering evidence on a cross-country trip.
He also looked forward to archery and woodcraft. His father had bought him a bow and a pocketknife—evidence perhaps against the conspiracy, unless the father was in on the Rebellion’s plan and was arming him covertly.
The mother’s dreams carried a different wind: a liberal-arts college in a living, breathing form, where students would study Blake and Milton for sheer intellectual pleasure, not as stepping stones toward computer science or finance. They dreamed of a campus where grades mattered little and where a humanist could offer letters of recommendation for a life of scholarship, not for a job at a bank. She pictured lectures beneath the autumnal arbor, chimneys of fires in the winter, and blossoms in spring, with students writing papers out of sheer curiosity rather than obligation. In her world, she would remain true to the life of the mind, a life more fantastical than the son’s.
The husband, too, pictured a practical future: finishing his dissertation, perhaps tending a small farm, cultivating apples and peaches, with experiences drawn from weekly visits to the Menlo Park farmers’ market, a tomato plant on their balcony, and the beehives in Anna Karenina’s world.
As for Giuseppe, the dog, when the eastern winds blew toward the horizon, he was the only one among them who seemed to know what lay ahead for all of them in the countryside.
__________________________________
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.
