Two In the Far North
Sustainability Book Club Selection for August
Two In the Far North, by Margaret Murie
How far north is the Far North? Minnesota? Upper British Columbia? How about ALASKA and points north of the Arctic Circle!
Mardy shares her journey as a nine-year old traveling to Fairbanks, Alaska with her mother in 1911. It is a long and wonderful journey from there to her marriage to Olaus Murie, a biologist who would later become the first director of the Wilderness Society.
Fairbanks, the only town Mardy knew as a child (being 8 days by horse sleigh or 10 days by river steamer to another town) was a “…busy place…happy-go-lucky place…no place for too much concern over morals-plenty of room for all the characters.” She adroitly observed that “On the frontier, before the wives arrived, I don’t think Society was organized.”
Hers is a joyous memoir of life with her new husband, a scientist who tracked caribou, and their rough-and-tumble, often dangerous, dog sled runs to caribou country. She asked herself often, and then asked the US Congress when in her 70’s, “Having been the basis of all our sophisticated society, doesn’t wilderness itself have a right to live on?” Their work transformed into law as Mardy stood in the White House Rose Garden to see President Johnson sign the Wilderness Act of 1964 into law.