Letters from Happy Valley: Memories of an Alaska Homesteader

Fifty years after leaving the family homestead in Happy Valley, Alaska, Dan Walker unexpectedly received a shoebox full of letters penned in 1958 by his parents as they traveled north from Sugar Tree Ridge, Ohio to build a new life on the Last Frontier. The letters ignited Walker's memory and he remembered how, as a small boy, he watched with wonder as his family built a home, harvested moose, and learned the ways of the North Country. A quiet thread of melancholy weaves through Walker's story as he remembers how his father's untimely death forced their large family to leave behind the life he loved. As much as the book is a quest to recall Walker's early years on the homestead, it is a search for the father he hardly knew. Dan Walker is a homesteader’s son who grew up to become a teacher and a writer. He has worked as a chef, innkeeper, merchant seaman, fisherman, and carpenter. Drawn from these varied experiences are blogs, essays, professional articles, and fiction published in magazines and literary journals such as the Journal of Geography, Alaska Magazine, and We Alaskans. Dan has more than thirty years in education and was named Teacher of the Year for Alaska in 1999. His consulting work has taken him throughout Alaska from Anchorage to Barrow and Perryville to Sitka where he works with principals, teachers, and students and is rewarded by experiencing the remote Alaska that few people get to know. Secondhand Summer is his first book.