Culvert And Timber

Culvert and Timber

A Novel of the Canisteo Valley

When an October deluge threatens the mountain hollows of Steuben County, New York, the county highway department issues an emergency performance bond on twenty-two failing drainage culverts. Irene Cole, forty-four, has twenty-four days to clear the cuts before the ground freezes solid. Her sole excavator is encumbered by a chattel mortgage with First Heritage Federal Credit Union, and the county superintendent refuses her single bid under equipment-spread rules—unless she executes a binding joint venture with Mark Vance.

Mark, forty-seven, operates an aging Caterpillar backhoe and a single tandem dump truck. Divorced seven years and estranged since the tax foreclosure of their family quarry, Irene and Mark sign the bond addendum over a rusted tailgate in the freezing rain. Neither has forgotten the silence that broke their marriage after the death of their infant daughter, but neither can survive the coming winter without the county escrow.

Fighting saturated blue shale, blown hydraulic cylinders, and deliberate regulatory sabotage from a corporate paving conglomerate, Irene and Mark must race against an unforgiving deadline. As the October freeze sets in, survival demands absolute mechanical precision, shared endurance, and a reckoning with the grief they buried in the dirt.

FICTION / Romance / Contemporary

FICTION / Small Town & Rural

FICTION / Romance / Workplace

upstate new york, blue collar romance, heavy equipment, civil construction, second chance, canisteo valley, steuben county, adult realism, working class fiction, workplace drama

en-US