About the Series
Twenty Mile Road is an audio drama in six episodes, set along a real stretch of road in rural northern Michigan. The road is named, as many Michigan roads are, for its distance from some long-forgotten reference point. The reference point matters more than anyone knows.
The series follows three characters over a single October: a long-haul trucker who makes this route on contract, a local woman who monitors the roadside emergency call boxes, and a figure who appears in each episode differently — sometimes as a hitchhiker, sometimes as a voice on the radio, sometimes as a shape in the headlights that doesn't resolve into anything recognizable.
On the Medium
Audio is the right medium for this story because audio is already where we go when we're afraid. The dark, driving at night, the radio the only company. We built the sound design around the actual acoustic properties of being inside a moving vehicle — the frequency shifts, the white noise of speed, the way certain pitches create a kind of hypnosis at highway speeds.
The score draws from field recordings made along the actual road: fence posts, culverts, the particular resonance of an empty grain elevator in autumn wind.
Structure
Each episode runs approximately 22 minutes — deliberately the length of a short drive. The series is designed to be listened to in a car, at night, ideally alone. We cannot be responsible for what happens after that.
Availability
Twenty Mile Road is available wherever podcasts are found. The complete series released in October 2024.