My Alaska Books: Too Far North & Living Too Far North
Too Far North: A Northern Cartoon Odyssey
In July 1986, my wife Pat and I and our then five kids, 6 months to 11 years old, headed for Alaska from our home in Virginia. We arrived a month and a half later to spend the school year in the tiny rural hamlet of Gakona Junction in the middle of the Copper River Valley, a sparsely populated area the size of West Virginia. There were many sources for humor despite the sometimes dangerous and always tenuous ability to live there. I created cartoons on life in rural Alaska for the new local paper, the Copper River Country Journal. In midwinter we collected 61 of them into the book Too Far North: A Northern Cartoon Odyssey and printed 1,000 copies, which we sold on the road in Alaska to pay for our trip home in June. Those cartoons have since been updated and colored and, along with a batch of additional cartoons, are compiled in this second edition of Too Far North some thirty-eight years later. The cartoons continue to appear in our friends and publishers' website, Copper River Country Journal 2020. For related information, see TD&H's Alaska Connection elsewhere in this website.
Living Too Far North: Drawing Humor from a Winter in Alaska
This book, the second edition of Living Too Far North: Drawing Humor from a Winter in Alaska, includes all the cartoons of the updated second edition of Too Far North, plus extensive commentary on their depiction of life in rural Alaska and their characterization of human nature in general. For the benefit of family and friends, there is also limited information on our trip north and over-winter sojourn in Gakona Junction, Alaska, a tiny crossroads settlement so small that had there been room for a road sign, it would have said "Welcome" on both sides.
We lived within the vast Copper River Valley, an area the size of West Virginia with a human population of about 2500, bounded on four sides by mountain ranges, including the United States' largest National Park and a semi-active volcano. This map includes the main roads and settlements of the valley, as well as mountains, rivers, and Wrangell-St Elias National Park, the nation's largest, with cartoon references to local human and natural activities. Gakona Junction, our crossroads, was located between the Native villages of Gakona and Gulkana, where you see the rabbit on the map. Gakona is the Athabascan word for rabbit.