Shallow Rapids: a small town collision

SMART, WRY HUMOUR

Everybody knows everybody’s business in Shallow Rapids, Alberta.

On Sundays, Analiese Drucker, 20, can be counted on to lead youth class, play piano and sing soprano. On workdays, she’s in coveralls repairing broken farm implements at Drucker Welding.

Along Railway Street, Analiese displays her steel Shapes: the wind-twisting sculptures that perplex the town elders.

Behind her welding visor, Analiese considers other possibilities for her life, but keeps those thoughts to herself—until she is backed into a corner by the town’s traditionalists.

Her decision made, she loads her pick-up with welding tools and heads down Sinners’ Highway.

Improbabilities intercept Analiese’s odyssey: Greville Carson, the quantum physicist turned portrait artist; the Diviner, a green-eyed enigma raised by a biker gang; Marcella, an art collector with a subterranean gallery and machine shop; Weed, Janice Joplin’s broken-hearted yesterday lover; and the lonesome outpost of Honour where her sculptures go viral.

The only messages from home are sent by Jim Stevens, the hockey-playing farmer in love with a woman who ….