her eyes and open arms. “A fifty-year-old bachelor,” laughed a friend familiar with my reclusive ways. “You never had a chance.” Our wedding took place amid bales of lumber and rolls of tar paper. The wedding feast was laid out on planks and sawhorses. Ed, the eighty-two-year-old owner of the cabin I was living in, gave the bride away. Ed had come to Alaska when it was still a territory, in 1946,* after training to fly torpedo bombers during World War II. Ten years later, after graduating from college in Fairbanks on the GI Bill and joining one of the earliest expeditions to put a man on top of 20,300-foot Mount Denali, he had acquired the land I was building on through a government program that gave veterans preference. He and his wife, Marjory, built their own home a few miles closer to town, rowing in every morning from a nearby island that had been homesteaded by a family named Weshenfelder in the early 1920s. The two worked from first light to last, digging a basement by hand, mixing concrete with a shovel, and moving twenty-four-foot timbers into their roadless homesite with a wheelbarrow. Marjory sprouted a seedling from a maple tree