Two in the Far North. - book reviews

Sierra, Jan-Feb, 1998 by Tom Lombardo

Margaret E. Murie and her biologist husband, Olaus, spent their honeymoon mushing huskies up a frozen Alaskan creek in sub-zero snow squalls. As she tells it, no better time could be had. In 1924 the exuberant newly-weds were among the first whites to settle in the Brooks Range, he as a U.S. Biological Survey scientist studying caribou and she as a passionate nature-lover who would become one of the grande dames of American environmentalism.

This re-released classic, originally published in 1962, is based on journals Murie wrote while building a marriage and starting a family among the miners, trappers, and Native Americans who coexisted in the raw Alaskan wildernes. Intensely aware of the novelty of being a woman in an unusual historical situation, she brings to life the generosity, self-reliance, and camaraderie of her colorful and farflung community. "On the frontier," she writes, "anyone lacking a sense of humor is inevitably weeded out, and only those who can laugh at it all are able to remain."

Murie's writing is akin to John Muir's: she conveys not only the physical presence of the wilderness, but also the sublime awareness wilderness can evoke in us. Once, trapped by a snowstorm, Murie and her husband built a lean-to and kindled a fire between it and their sled. Unperturbed by her situation, she awakens in the night to find the skies have cleared: "I felt somehow privileged, humble yet triumphant, waking so in the night hours, as though I had found omnipotence at work undisturbed."

The couple later settled in the Grand Tetons, and over the decades many a notable environmentalist and wildlife biologist traversed their cabin's rough-hewn porch. Murie's ability to inspire the likes of David Brower and Howard Zahniser, who cofounded The Wilderness Society with Olaus, is legendary. But it was her decades of hands-on advocacy that helped create the Wilderness Act of 1968 and the Alaska Lands Act of 1980, whose Rose Garden-signing included commendations from former President Jimmy Carter. Tireless, Murie now works to protect the Arctic.

Murie's homespun activism earned her the Sierra Club's John Muir Award in 1982 -- though she maintains today, at 95, that all she did was "make cookies and serve tea." While her baking may be excellent, it is her words that invite her guests -- and her readers -- to keep nature's "omnipotence at work" undisturbed.