North Conway is the destination of Dan Torrance’s Thursday-night drive from Frazier and the home of the intimate Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that gives his recovery a regular place and rhythm. In the Amvets hall, the Big Book is read a little at a time, discussion can stray from the printed page, and private disclosures become possible. The town is significant less as a described landscape than as the setting for a community in which Dan’s hard-won sobriety is practiced through attendance, gratitude, and service to others.

Setting and Weekly Journey

In January 2004, Dan makes the twenty-mile drive from Frazier to North Conway every Thursday. He is working at Helen Rivington House, earning a decent salary, and has regained his driver’s license. His car is an unassuming three-year-old Caprice with blackwall tires and an unreliable radio, but driving it matters: after losing the freedom to travel by car, he feels fortunate simply to start the engine. The route is therefore more than transportation to a meeting. It is a repeated sign of a life becoming manageable again.

Dan’s attendance also belongs to the daily practice of recovery. Casey Kingsley has urged him to include driving in his gratitude meditations, linking gratitude with staying sober. Dan has been sober for nearly three years and hopes to reach that anniversary without taking a drink. His hospice work, including volunteer service, is another form of making amends. The Thursday journey places these private commitments inside a shared routine: he arrives not as a visitor seeking a single solution but as someone returning to a group whose work continues week after week.

The Big Book Meeting

The North Conway gathering is called We Study Sobriety. Its members read through Bill Wilson’s Big Book in sequence, taking up where the previous meeting stopped. After reaching the final pages, they return to The Doctor’s Statement and begin again. A typical session covers about ten pages in half an hour; the remaining half hour is meant for discussion of what the group has read.

That plan gives the meeting a dependable structure, but not a rigid one. Discussion sometimes follows the text and often wanders elsewhere, like a planchette moving unpredictably across a Ouija board. The group’s small size helps distinguish it from larger meetings in the area, where speakers can retreat into familiar generalities. In North Conway, attendance rarely exceeds a dozen, even during the summer tourist season. Dan senses that people in this smaller room may say things they would not disclose in a meeting of fifty or seventy recovering alcoholics and drug users.

A remembered meeting illustrates that openness. When discussion turns to the Big Book chapter addressed to wives, younger women object to its dated assumptions and ask why no corresponding chapter for husbands has been added. Dan expects one outspoken member, Gemma T., to launch into an angry response. Instead, she speaks quietly about a burden she has carried since she was seventeen, saying that she needs to release it if she is to stay away from cocaine and wine. The moment shifts the room from debate over the text to the personal stakes that can lie behind addiction and recovery.

Fellowship, Service, and Anonymity

North Conway’s meeting also gives Dan a setting in which his ability to help can be put to use without turning that help into public credit. When John Dalton fears that a missing seven-hundred-dollar watch may damage his marriage and career, Dan suggests where to look. At the following Thursday’s meeting, Dan arrives early, prepared to make the coffee in case John has abandoned the group. John is there, and the watch has been found where Dan indicated it would be. His enthusiastic embrace and relief make the return feel, to him, like a small miracle.

When John asks how he can thank him, Dan points him toward Twelfth Step work and insists on anonymity: John should keep the matter to himself. The exchange gives the meeting an ethical dimension beyond study or mutual comfort. Dan’s guidance is that help should lead outward—to service for another struggling person—rather than become a story that enhances the helper’s reputation. The group’s smallness makes fellowship personal, while the demand for discretion sets a limit on what can be carried beyond it.

Narrative Significance

North Conway is one of the places where the book makes recovery visible as repetition rather than revelation. Dan drives there each week, reads, listens, and takes part; the group in turn provides a room small enough for anger, embarrassment, and painful confession to enter the discussion. The regular journey contrasts with the crisis-driven episodes elsewhere in his life, without suggesting that sobriety has made him free of difficulty. Its value lies in the return itself: a recovered license, a working car, a meeting that starts again at the beginning of the book, and another opportunity to help someone else.

The town’s meeting also clarifies how Dan understands his own usefulness. At North Conway, that usefulness appears in ordinary acts—showing up early, making coffee if needed, offering a practical lead, and directing thanks toward the next act of service. Elsewhere, his work at Helen Rivington House brings him to the bedsides of dying patients, where he attends to fear and helps them approach death. Those hospice scenes occur at a different location, but they deepen the contrast: North Conway is where Dan’s recovery is sustained among peers; his work elsewhere shows how the capacities fostered by that recovery can become care for people nearing the end of life.