Away Up the North Fork: A Girls Search for Home in the Wilderness

In the 1970s, Annie Chappell dreams of a homesteading lifea life like the one depicted in Laura Ingalls Wilders Little House in the Big Woods, where the world is uncomplicated. If she can get to that place, she thinks, the trouble she faces at homealcohol use, sexual abuse, and the sorrows of modern-day issueswill disappear. Home in Denver during a break from boarding school in the spring of 1973, she meets Bill, a mountain man Vietnam vet whos traveling through town on his way back to his cabin on the Canadian border in Montana, and she falls in love with the life he describes. In October, after months of imagining a life with Bill, she runs away from boarding school in the East to find him so he can teach her the wild ways.
When Annies plan fails, she goes back to school to graduate, but she continues to exchange letters with Bill for the rest of the school yearand after graduation, with her parents blessing, she makes her way to Montana to live with him. Homesteading with an older man in the wilderness, however, presents challenges she hasnt anticipated. Ultimately, Annies experiences with Bill push her to face her own strengths and fears, as well as her relationship with her parents and homeand to begin to figure out who she really wants to be. See more