Among Washington's Alps: Fourth Grade in Holden Village, East of Winston (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798278011231)

Set in the 1950s in the upper Lake Chelan valley, A Year in the Washington Alps is a memoir of one long, crystalline year spent in Winston, the cluster of miners' houses above the better-known company town of Holden Village. Through a fourth-grader's eyes we see a world that is small and complete: cottages clinging to the hillside, the rope-tow ski hill just beyond the last row of houses, the Rec Hall with its movies, bowling lanes, and square dances, and the mine whose twenty-year life quietly defines the horizon of the adults.

The story moves through a season of small adventures-school days, Cub Scouts, hikes, snowstorms, the first experiments with courage and fear-while in the background parents navigate work, money, and the question of what comes after the ore runs out. It's a book about a particular place and time, but also about how a child learns to read a community's seams and fault lines, and carries that little mountainside world forward for the rest of his life.