The Long Glide North

The lights flicker first. Then the well pump goes silent. Then the news stops making sense. Mason Holt has been a careful man all his life — Army Ranger, husband, father, the kind of pilot who knew the weather before he checked the forecast. At fifty-eight, on forty-two acres outside Gilmer, Texas, he's earned the right to a quiet retirement. His four-year-old granddaughter Junebug doesn't have time for a quiet retirement. She has asthma. The pharmacy in Driggs, Idaho has gone dark along with most of the country's other systems, and Mason's daughter Hannah is rationing the last of her child's medication while his wife works a ham radio network of strangers who still believe in opening their kitchen doors. So Mason loads a tandem paramotor trike with everything Junebug needs, kisses his wife goodbye, and launches north into a country quietly sorting itself into the loud bad ones and the quiet good ones. Six days of flying. Twelve hundred miles of broken America. One mountain range between him and the cabin where his granddaughter is learning to take smaller breaths. The bad ones are loud. The good ones are quiet. Mason is going to need both kinds to make it home.AUTHOR BIO: Steven Graff is an Army veteran and an active paramotor pilot. He lives with his wife on a farm in Gilmer, Texas. The Long Glide North is his first novel.