Bedrock combines two story lines — the romantic friendship between Clea and Elke, presented in a series of chronological flashbacks beginning with Clea's childhood, and several mystery-adventures in the lives of the denizens of Roches Ridge, resolved as the severed foot found in Clea's shrubbery leads to Orion's trapping shed.

The novel's final scene emphasizes the enduring qualities of human quirkiness as the characters converge at the town's bicentennial celebration, accompanied by a spate of new marriages, pregnancies, and other personal celebrations, culminating in the cow bingo event, where a cow pie on the square marks luckiest townspeople. Her house restored, Clea's landscaping fits the rocky topography, "And they all lived happily ever after, a few logs short of a cord."

Alther's comic plot structure is that of the pastoral romance, where the lovers who venture into the woods and the rustics they find there are joined together...