Talkeetna Good Time

As a young man growing up near Valley, Nebraska, I dreamed of wild adventures and living “on the edge.”  In simple journals, I recorded my thoughts and wild imaginings.   As life provided new experiences, I captured my world through photography and words.  Later in life, my wife and family encouraged me to share my tales of the North with others who share my enthusiasm for living big.In my book “Talkeetna Good Time,” I open up my heart and reveal intimate musings of a young boy determined to become a pilot and push beyond the expected.  I married a young woman willing to accompany me on this amazing and often perilous journey.  After a few years in the Canadian North, I moved my young family to a small bush community in Alaska.Most of the stories tell of ‘bigger than life” Alaskan characters that dwell in simple structures and endure unimaginable hardships to put down roots in the frigid land they love. I will ever be grateful to the hearty folk who have become part of my story.  As life itself, I share the humorous, the exultant, the threatening, and the utterly depressing.Dear to my heart are the wonderful creatures that roam the north.  “Mary’s Bear” and “Don Got My Goat” are accounts of some of my encounters with nature’s bounty.  My heart still remembers with fondness the cold nights with “shimmering ribbons of blue, green, and red that form a gigantic curtain, pulled across the lake by the hand of God.”  Be careful as you read or you, too, may become infected with the “Alaska disease.”