County Highway

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

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

“It is very difficult to grow up in this country without being offered, at one point or another, cripplingly addictive d...
05/06/2026

“It is very difficult to grow up in this country without being offered, at one point or another, cripplingly addictive drugs. ‘Very difficult’ becomes ‘virtually impossible’ if one is poor; or one needs major surgery; or one has a juvenile inclination away from the dull-seeming strictures of middle-class respectability toward the taboo; or if one remembers that alcohol and prescription pills are themselves ‘cripplingly addictive drugs,’ which often lead, as much as one would like to avoid PE-class preaching, to other, harder drugs.
The right amount of money, the right education, the right town — these can be shields against addiction, of course, but they are hardly invincible ones.”

Delray Beach, Florida, is known as both America’s rehab and relapse capital. Noah Rawlings travels to this palm-tree studded paradise to get an intimate insight into the folks who have found themselves trapped in the whirlpool of what’s come to be known as “the Florida Shuffle.”

Art by Anita Kunz

“‘Them hogs weren’t so bad when I was a kid,’ he said, handing me a beer. ‘More of a nuisance than a real threat. But, m...
05/04/2026

“‘Them hogs weren’t so bad when I was a kid,’ he said, handing me a beer. ‘More of a nuisance than a real threat. But, man, have they gotten to be something nasty. Just about everybody in all of Brazos County has had their land torn up by the hogs. We got a joke here. There’s only two types of Texans, those who got hogs and those who are about to have them. Don’t matter if you’re growing corn or soybeans or peanuts.’”

In our current issue, Jack Chorley heads to Texas to take a stab at its prodigious feral hog population which has long plagued the state’s farmers. In its midst, hunting tourism flourishes while folks from all over the world fly out to have their “most American experience ever.”

Art by

“‘Them hogs weren’t so bad when I was a kid,’ he said, handing me a beer. ‘More of a nuisance than a real threat. But, m...
05/04/2026

“‘Them hogs weren’t so bad when I was a kid,’ he said, handing me a beer. ‘More of a nuisance than a real threat. But, man, have they gotten to be something nasty. Just about everybody in all of Brazos County has had their land torn up by the hogs. We got a joke here. There’s only two types of Texans, those who got hogs and those who are about to have them. Don’t matter if you’re growing corn or soybeans or peanuts.’”

In our current issue, Jack Chorley heads to Texas to take a stab at its prodigious feral hog population which has long plagued the state’s farmers. In its midst has grown a prosperous hunting tourism industry where folks from all over the world can have their “most American experience ever.”

Art by

Our May-June issue is en route, and it’s got it all — .lamb’s dispatch on Big Sur’s jade hunters, Noah Rawlings’ hauntin...
05/01/2026

Our May-June issue is en route, and it’s got it all — .lamb’s dispatch on Big Sur’s jade hunters, Noah Rawlings’ haunting report from America’s rehab capital, .azo infiltrating the enormous cheese caves beneath Springfield, Missouri, an excerpt from Josh Weil’s forthcoming novel, roller coasters and feral hogs, plus all the music coverage you know and love.

Subscribe today, you won’t want to miss this one.

“Here’s a caged tiger in the truck bed; here three rumpled dogs, one with a knowing look; here a giant inflatable rat. T...
04/28/2026

“Here’s a caged tiger in the truck bed; here three rumpled dogs, one with a knowing look; here a giant inflatable rat. The objects in the bed, in the setup of its context, are the punchlines to wry visual jokes. In Houston the setup is the anodyne office parking lot above; the punchline is a lone toy six-shooter in the truck bed below. You can almost hear Friedlander giggling. In Washington, DC the angle of the truck bed points to JESUS, but in the beat-up bed is a titanic monkey wrench — which of the two is going to fix this broken-down world that we are heir to?“

Where have all the good pick-up trucks gone? From Volume 1 Issue 5, Matthew Fishbane reveals that chickens are to blame for their replacement by oversized honkers, and explores the pick-up’s mythos through photographer Lee Friedlander’s prodigious archive that immortalizes our most belovedly practical and modest automobile.

📷 by Lee Friedlander

A very happy Independent Bookstore Day to all the shops that help to build authentic relationships in their neighborhood...
04/25/2026

A very happy Independent Bookstore Day to all the shops that help to build authentic relationships in their neighborhoods every day, as well as curate a space for the community to learn about the world around them without an algorithm determining their interests.

We’re so grateful to be a part of such a colorful network of booksellers across the nation, many of which we had the pleasure of meeting during our summer tour. Follow the link in our bio to find your closest County Highway stockist and snag a copy today — you might just make some interesting new friends.

“At today’s Coachella, the denizens of Los Angeles have recreated the elitism and inequality that makes them feel at hom...
04/17/2026

“At today’s Coachella, the denizens of Los Angeles have recreated the elitism and inequality that makes them feel at home. From the car-camping refugee-style squalor of the average attendee to the $32,000 all-inclusive yurt with dedicated golf-cart chauffeurs, daily maid services, and private bathrooms, showers, and masseuses, the once-democratic festival has all the trappings necessary to completely insulate the affluent from the realities of the common concert-goers. Beauty, power, and access are now the currencies of the grounds, far from the former vibes of raunchiness, charitable neighborliness, and sincere fandom. Influencers, models, and celebrities attend to post their looks and fits and exclusive soirees on social media, fueling the annual inflation of ticket prices, concessions, party favors, and revenues for AEG (the conglomerate which engulfed Goldenvoice in 2006).“

From Volume 1 Issue 6, industry insider Miles Weatherby reports from two decades of behind-the-scenes experience at the world’s most Instagrammed festival.

📷 by Carl Nenzén Lovén / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

“As for me, I fell in love at first sight or not at all. The men I liked were sad bastards and charismatic psychopaths —...
04/14/2026

“As for me, I fell in love at first sight or not at all. The men I liked were sad bastards and charismatic psychopaths — ju**ie musicians, wet-brained poets, guys with broken noses or missing bicuspids who cried during sad movies. Sometimes I fell in love pre-sight, planning my wedding vows with the middle-aged biker who’d emailed me a mixtape or swooning at the typewritten letter from the novelist with whom I’d start a life just as soon as he was released from federal prison. Once, I moved across the country with a long-haired piano player I’d met a couple days beforehand in a late-night bar. Things were so romantic when the two of us were strangers. It’s once you get to know each other that the trouble starts.”

We’re proud to announce Panamerica’s forthcoming title “Midwestern Death Trip” by Meaghan Garvey — part memoir, part reportage, it combines the great American road trip genre with a heart-breaking coming-of-age story. We’ve excerpted her introduction in our March-April issue as “Wisconsin Death Trip Revisited,” offering readers a taste of her unsparing voice. The book will be available most everywhere books are sold May 12th, 2026.

Now’s a great time to sign up for our Panamerica Book Club and receive all of our titles the moment they come out of the press, including Midwestern Death Trip. Join our Book Club today at the link in our bio.

📷 by Charles van Schaick/Wisconsin Historical Society

04/10/2026

“Eddie and I were in the studio, tripping like crazy but also trying to focus our emotions,” George Clinton recalls in his 2014 memoir “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You?”
“I told him to play like his mother had died, to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything that was inside him and let it out thought his guitar.”

Happy birthday to the late Eddie Hazel, the sonic pioneer who brought his guitar to life for the most heart-wrenching solo in music history.

Address

County Highway PO Box 53
Franklin, NY
13775

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when County Highway posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category