In the town of Founder, on the edge of a Cretaceous bog and a fossil forest, there is Everyday U.S, American life without any certain sense of what any day will bring. An unknown and unavailable "founder", a series of unsolved perpetrated crimes in the forest, ancient bones surfacing at the bog, mined for gold and bog iron, a Founder Asylum that leaks its inmates into the civic life of the town, half the town workers living in the memory of their paper mill shut down years before, a native son returning to find a love left behind, a journalist, Earhart Hearder, facing the shutdown of the Founder Chronicle, against her factual judgment slowly entranced by a charismatic former Asylum inmate, a mayoral campaign that never ends, so much ambiguity regarding who is pronounced dead yet seen, piratical greed debating the offspring of Jesus.