Leaving Washington, D.C. for home in Pittsburgh, Rod Gaughan gets caught on I-70 in Southcentral Pennsylvania during the killer blizzard of January 1996. As traffic threatens to stop on the icy highway, Rod hears a voice that his dogged him for years: "Go. Now!" He follows other vehicles off the next exit onto surface roads. Consulting his map, Rod takes a big chance: state roads so small they're numbered with four digits could take him over a mountain ridge to the rainy side of the storm and pick up I-76 home. Near the top of the mountain, with night falling on an unplowed road in Sipes Mill (population 499), Rod's Volvo slides into a roadside ditch, breaking its left front axle. Rod is rescued by the widowed former owner of the town's sawmill and offered a bed. In the next forty-eight hours, without television news, and then without any power at all, Rod has time, and the help of his hostess Mary Wood, to confront for better and worse all that has gone wrong with his life.
