The northwestern US, 1918. The town of Commonwealth has successfully kept a lot of its small population within its boundaries, despite many conscription drives. First, because its main industry is the sawmill, which provides a lot of wood for those newfangled airplane things, so many men are deemed essential war workers; secondly, because the town is so unusually remote. Founded as a socialist experiment almost, it lies fifteen miles down a small track leading from what's already one step off nowhere, in the general region of Seattle. It might be what would in more recent times be disparaged as a hippy commune, but it keeps its citizens remote from, and, it admits, a generation backward to, the rest of the world.