Disillusioned with his aborted financial career and the urban life he had been leading, Michael Eddy is spending the summer hiking the Appalachian Trail. Reaching Vermont in August, he decides to stop briefly to visit his parents, who live just down the highway from the trail, in the place he left behind seven years ago. But reentering his past in this place is more complicated than he has expected. He finds a part of himself there that he doesn't want to leave behind again - a part involving his parents, and his one-time girlfriend Jessica, now a single mother, and his high school fishing buddy Randy, now a sophisticated grownup who blogs about global warming and climate change. Michael's relationships with these people are renewed and intensified in the days leading up to Tropical Storm Irene - which is about to change the future for all of them.
Disillusioned with his aborted financial career and the urban life he had been leading, Michael Eddy is spending the summer hiking the Appalachian Trail. Reaching Vermont in August, he decides to stop briefly to visit his parents, who live just down the highway from the trail, in the place he left behind seven years ago. But reentering his past in this place is more complicated than he has expected. He finds a part of himself there that he doesn't want to leave behind again - a part involving his parents, and his one-time girlfriend Jessica, now a single mother, and his high school fishing buddy Randy, now a sophisticated grownup who blogs about global warming and climate change. Michael's relationships with these people are renewed and intensified in the days leading up to Tropical Storm Irene - which is about to change the future for all of them.