An illustrated memoir of the good life at a small-time wilderness lodge. In a young man staked a land claim on Fox Island, near Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. Beginning in the early s, he, the author, and a curmudgeonly carpenter built and ran Fox Island Lodge for seven eventful years. This is the same island that inspired Rockwell Kents classic, Wilderness (New England Press, first published in ). Susan Roebuck writes of passion and particularity about the people who inhabit her fully engaged life and provides glimpses into the rugged beauty of the Alaskan terrain and the mystical grandeur of the New Mexican landscape. In sharing her hard-won wisdom and maverick sensibilities, she empowers all of us who long to live courageous, spiritually enriched and autonomous lives.