County Highway

County Highway A magazine about America in the form of a 19th century newspaper

Mark your calendars — crazy Midwestern girl summer starts next week.Come raise hell with as she embarks on the Midweste...
06/05/2026

Mark your calendars — crazy Midwestern girl summer starts next week.

Come raise hell with as she embarks on the Midwestern Death Tour where she’ll be reading and discussing her debut novel. Part coming-of-age memoir, part 1940s film noir jailbreak, “Midwestern Death Trip” is a speed demon’s encounter with the depths of American loneliness — and it’s coming to a town near you.

“More than other songwriters, Diaz captures the strange, gut-wrenching in-betweens of breakups. The characters that inha...
06/04/2026

“More than other songwriters, Diaz captures the strange, gut-wrenching in-betweens of breakups. The characters that inhabit her songs aren’t conventional wrongdoers, and that’s exactly the problem. ‘Why’d You Have To Bring Me Flowers’ is about the absurdity of a partner bringing flowers to a breakup while the singer wonders what layers of selfishness lie behind the ‘nice guy’ facade. She recalls: ‘I woke up mad at five-thirty in the morning, and just picked up the guitar and sat down and ripped it off, like a Band-Aid.’”

Ben Arthur sits down with in Nashville to discuss life on the road, heartbreak, and the hard-won experiences that have made her one of the most beloved songwriters working across genres today.

📷 by Allister Ann

“Rock ‘n’ roll is not a thing anymore. Maybe Jesus isn’t a thing, either. If you were to step up your game and insert Je...
06/02/2026

“Rock ‘n’ roll is not a thing anymore. Maybe Jesus isn’t a thing, either. If you were to step up your game and insert Jesus into your music with faithful, distorted-guitar energy, and dare to claim that Jesus is your friend, it’s hard to imagine that your efforts would make a dent in the culture. Yet there was a time when this two-pronged attack could elevate a band into the limelight (and no, the recent acclaim for ‘Geese’ doesn’t count in my book). There once was a time when you could wear a leather jacket and turn your amps up loud in biker bars, and not a soul in the grimy, tattooed, drunken crowd would raise an objection or toss empty beer bottles in your direction when you claimed that Jesus is alright.”

From their stint as the Hell’s Angels house band to their softer yacht rock era, Gerry Stanek chronicles The Doobie Brothers in our latest issue.

📷 by Robert Landau/Getty Images

Happy June, y’all. As the days get longer and warmer now’s a perfect time to treat yourself to a subscription — we make ...
06/01/2026

Happy June, y’all.

As the days get longer and warmer now’s a perfect time to treat yourself to a subscription — we make a great fireside companion and beach read, plus we don’t mind getting a little sandy, being used as emergency kindling, or wrapping up your next catch.

Subscribe today via the link in our bio, and thank us tomorrow.

Crazy Midwestern girl summer is almost here.Starting June 9th, will embark on the Midwestern Death Tour in her blood-re...
05/27/2026

Crazy Midwestern girl summer is almost here.

Starting June 9th, will embark on the Midwestern Death Tour in her blood-red Cadillac to celebrate the publication of her brilliant new book. She’ll be joined by and in conversation with County Highway’s associate editor, Valen Lambert.

Come hang out — you won’t want to miss this.

“By 3 AM I was experiencing something like musical coenesthesia. I’d only recently learned of this rarefied neurological...
05/26/2026

“By 3 AM I was experiencing something like musical coenesthesia. I’d only recently learned of this rarefied neurological experience (in a book about Proust no less). It’s essentially the idea of a sensory crossover or convergence, one where colors and images intensify with musical sound into something mystical. Not exactly a hallucination, but close. 
If the coenesthesia had a catch, especially when paired with bourbon at 3 AM, it was this: It inflated my confidence as a writer while diminishing my skills. I reminded myself that only the sobriety of the next day — record player off, darlings killed — would confirm that good writing about art comes from restraint.”

In our latest music spread, James McWilliams curls up with a bottle of midnight bourbon and a few bewitching records by outlaw poet and dirty realist .

Art by

“Curious and often misled cheesers occasionally attempt to sneak past security in the dark of night, Newell admits. They...
05/21/2026

“Curious and often misled cheesers occasionally attempt to sneak past security in the dark of night, Newell admits. They try darting into the caves through the train tracks, truck entrances, or through more dangerous routes — about which he was understandably vague. Still, it is clear that such attempted breaches happen with some regularity. 
The public Facebook group ‘Springfield Underground Cheese Heistposting’ often references the ultimate goal of these expeditions: liberating the cheese from the clutches of the hoarders. Memes allude to the mythical revelry of a daring burglary or brazen hijacking of the supposed bounty of the Springfield Underground. Cheese radicals believe some government program or another controls more than a billion pounds of cheese in the caves, and a glancing web search appears to confirm their suspicion: Many an article has fallen victim to the hearsay mill. Surely, the accumulation of such a massive hoard of cheese must suggest a dark purpose beyond the ken of ordinary people that is being masterminded by an agency of the federal government.”

In our latest issue, Lazo Gitchos successfully infiltrates the Springfield Underground, a three-million-square-foot cold storage facility — colloquially known as the cheese cave.

📷 courtesy Library of Congress

“The decay of the Six Flags America theme park outside Washington, DC, is a painful reminder that America itself may onl...
05/19/2026

“The decay of the Six Flags America theme park outside Washington, DC, is a painful reminder that America itself may only be a passing moment on the billion-year scale of geologic time. Superman: Ride of Steel is now in danger of being melted into industrial sludge, perhaps to be repurposed as the siding of an Amazon fulfilment center. While the statue of Daffy Duck in a tricorner hat that crowned the fake Independence Hall next to the fake Liberty Bell — discordantly Philly-located landmarks — will be lucky to decorate the lawn of some wealthy Americana enthusiast, to me it’s a no-brainer that The Wild One, until recently the oldest operating rollercoaster in the United States, should be relocated to the National Mall. But this is the dream of a child. The Wild One will be sawdust soon; there is no fantasy that can rescue it, and probably us, from the junkyard.”

Armin Rosen takes one last trip to the Six Flags of his youth before it’s demolished alongside the rest of the American dream.

📷 courtesy NBC5 / KXAS-TV / Portal to Texas History

We are thrilled to announce that Meaghan Garvey’s part coming-of-age memoir and part 1940s film noir jail-break, “Midwes...
05/12/2026

We are thrilled to announce that Meaghan Garvey’s part coming-of-age memoir and part 1940s film noir jail-break, “Midwestern Death Trip,” is now available via the link in our bio and most anywhere books are sold.

Propelled by her mother’s death into a half-life of drug-dealing boyfriends and shivery mornings, Meaghan finds salvation in dingy dive bars where she’s ever the stranger moving on to somewhere else. When chance gifts her a blood-red Cadillac Coupe deVille, she sets out on an amphetamine-fueled road trip through her native Midwest in the hopes of resolving the mysteries of her itinerant personal life through encounters with the places and characters that define her imagination: water demons, lake camps, haunted houses, ship-wrecks, speed-induced truckers, wise-cracking barflies, and the occasional Elvis impersonator.

On her journeys, she reveals that most people and places are far more interesting than they may seem. “Midwestern Death Trip” is a speed demon’s encounter with the depths of American loneliness from the Hunter Thompson of the 2020s.

Follow the link in our bio to get your copy of “Midwestern Death Trip,” or if you haven’t already, to join our Panamerica Book Club to receive all of our titles hot off the press.

“‘This is one of the big adventures we can have these days,’ Wobber once told a San Francisco news anchor, after making ...
05/08/2026

“‘This is one of the big adventures we can have these days,’ Wobber once told a San Francisco news anchor, after making a name for himself jade diving. ‘You know, there aren’t too many things you can do like this.’ 
    It was in this spirit that Wobber and his crew wrestled a 9,000-pound jade boulder to the shore — one they dubbed ‘the Nephripod’ — a feat that assured his place in the annals of California folklore. It took ten months to salvage the Nephripod, which involved extracting, lifting, and delivering the mineral leviathan to a more accessible beach in June of 1971, travails that Wobber later chronicled in his memoir ‘Jade Beneath the Sea.’ In the end, he described the feat as a ‘gift of self, a breaking away from present life that would connect me with jade in deeper ways than I could ever imagine.’ The boulder was initially appraised at $180,000 — a number which meant nothing to him, compared to the quest for meaning it inspired.” 

Valen Lambert travels to Big Sur, California where a colorful culture of divers, miners, and artists surrounds the world’s only deposit of jade hidden just beneath its coastal waters.

Photos courtesy of Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History and the author

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