Isaac leaves Buell

Isaac English’s departure from Buell begins after he realizes that Lee English and Billy Poe have rekindled their intimacy. Hurt by the discovery and convinced he has arrived too late to repair what has broken, he leaves home in darkness and follows the old rail line west, turning a family rupture into a solitary journey toward California.

The Decision to Leave

Before dawn, Isaac gathers a blanket and extra socks, takes a backpack, and quietly goes downstairs. Lee is asleep on the couch; as he prepares to leave, she wakes and asks where he is going. He initially says he is going nowhere, but when she tells him she heard him and Billy Poe, he confronts her with what he overheard: she had told Billy she loved him. Lee insists that the relationship is an old thing and now over. Isaac tells her she is a day too late to make things right, then walks out before she can answer.

His anger carries more than the immediate discovery. He thinks of his mother’s death and connects it to the losses of Lee and Billy Poe, while also recognizing that his bitter judgments of Lee are thoughts he is telling himself. The scene leaves the precise weight of each grievance unresolved, but makes clear that he is departing amid grief, resentment, and a sense that his ties to home have already come undone.

Across the Mill and Out of Town

Isaac moves through the ravine and along the creek to the steel mill south of town, then heads north through its dismantling grounds. The abandoned complex still holds four rusted blast furnaces, long empty buildings, slag cars on their tracks, and stacks of structural steel left behind when the dismantling ran out of money. He passes beneath the ore crane and leaves the industrial ruins behind by way of the railway.

The tracks take him past Buell, his old school, and the road to Billy Poe’s home. The railbed narrows and winds along the hillside between dense woods; soon the town and its familiar landmarks disappear from view. The physical route gives the departure its decisive shape: Isaac does not simply leave a house after an argument but crosses the landscape of his former life and continues alone beyond it.

The Journey Begins

Isaac is bound for California, imagining warmth and a desert of his own. The narration frames this as the beginning of the journey in earnest, while showing how little certainty accompanies it: he watches for fires at hobo camps in the woods and recasts himself as a king of snakes and a duke of hoboes. A satellite crossing the sky links his solitary movement to other wanderers, from traders to astronauts, without making the road feel less lonely.

As night gives way to gray dawn, birds stir in the woods according to their own steady rhythms. Isaac contrasts their unchanging rules with his chosen life outside them, imagining a person who makes his own sun and prefers the night. The passage establishes the departure as both escape and self-invention; it records his intention to reach California, not his eventual arrival.