In the nineteen-eighties, an amateur historian of the Adirondacks recorded the fading memories of an aging woodsman and bootlegger, searching for details about the old-time fiddle player and rustic builder Fran Germaine. The woodsman's wild tales faded into dust more than once until the discovery of a diary kept by Rosalyn Orloff, the socialist writer and political theorist of the twenties and thirties, and reputed lover of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung.

The Power Line travels from the villages of Lake Aurora and Saranac Lake, New York 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 connects lives and periods often overlooked in the history of northern New York and the Canadian borderlands, shining light on the continuity of a disputed and murky past with a living and recognizable present.