The Power Line veers from the villages of Lake Aurora and Saranac Lake in the years following World War I, when Prohibition and tuberculosis kept them hopping, to Montreal and a thrilling escape by canoe across the St. Lawrence River in the dead of winter. It follows the adventures of Fran Germaine, rustic builder and old-time fiddle player, and his friend Lonnie Monroe, the source for the tapes and transcriptions made in the eighties about their days working as together as bootleggers for Legs Diamond. 

The tapes, made by the guide and independent scholar Abel St. Martin, were discovered only after his disappearance on an Amazonian river expedition years later. They partly explain what happened in the rumored shootout in 1929 at Donnelly's Corners, north of the village of Saranac Lake. 

 But The Power Line moves on to the journals of the noted political theorist, author, and reputed lover of Carl Jung, Rosalyn Orloff, who also studied with William James and went to Radcliffe with Gertrude Stein. They shed light not only on a little known period of Germaine's biography, but also on a little known stream of influence in the Adirondack story and its centrality to American philosophy, psychology, art, and environmentalism.  

 Fast paced but allusive and wide ranging, The Power Line connects lives and periods often overlooked in the history of northern New York and the Canadian borderlands, tracing a path from a disputed and murky past to a living and recognizable present.