AUTHOR’S NOTE: In late 1948, after six months of homestead living on the central Kenai Peninsula, Rusty Lancashire wrote home to her folks in Illinois. She noted that some people who had arrived at about the same time they had were already pulling up stakes. She and husband Larry, however, were in it for the long haul: “Larry and I may be dopes to live like this,” she wrote, “but we love it.” They lived on their homestead for the next five decades.