Twenty-year-old Isaac English walks past the woods and railroad tracks of nearby Buell, Pennsylvania. Carrying $4,000 stolen from his father’s pension, he plans to hop a train to California, escape the rust belt, get an education, and carve out his future. He comes to his friend Billy Poe’s house—a double-wide trailer on 80 acres of wooded hills—hoping Poe will come with him. Poe, a star high school athlete, “his glory days already past, a dozen empty beer cans at his feet” (6), finds the idea ludicrous. He will, however, accompany Isaac to the rail yard.

Isaac and Poe walk together, passing the ruins of Pennsylvania’s once-mighty steel industry. When they walk by the river, Isaac thinks of his mother, who died by suicide five years earlier; she drowned herself by entering a body of water with heavy stones in her pockets. He wonders morbidly if he “take[s] after” his mother; he recalls one night when he walked on the frozen river and fell in, and Poe pulled him out. Afterward, Isaac claimed that he’d just wanted to experience the plunge—but his inner narration, in the present, suggests it was a suicide attempt.

As it starts to rain, they take shelter in an abandoned machine shop.