While visiting Starkfield’s post office, the narrator—an engineer temporarily working at a nearby power plant—notices a scarred and limping man. Impressed by the man’s “careless powerful look” (8), he learns from the local stagecoach driver that the man’s name is Ethan Frome and that he received his injuries in a sledding accident 24 years earlier. When a strike at the plant forces the narrator to winter in Starkfield, he becomes increasingly curious about Ethan. However, most people in Starkfield seem reluctant to discuss Ethan’s past.

One day, the narrator abruptly finds himself without a ride to the train station. The stagecoach driver, Harmon Gow, suggests that he hire Ethan, whose farm is unprofitable. For the next several days, Ethan takes the narrator to and from the station in his sleigh. Ethan is generally silent during these rides but shows occasional interest in the narrator’s work.

Later that week, a snowstorm shuts down the railroad, and Ethan offers to drive the narrator the full 10 miles to the power plant. The journey takes them past Ethan’s farm, which looks bleak and run-down; Ethan remarks that the railway’s construction eliminated much of the traffic that used to pass the house and attributes his mother’s mental decline and death to the ensuing isolation.