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On her 100th birthday, lifelong conservationist Mardy Murie reaffirmed her enduring wish for wilderness preservation
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE MURIE FAMILY COLLECTION
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Editor’s Note: Mardy Murie passed away in October 2003 at the age of 101, a year after this story appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002–03 edition of Teton Home. To reflect this fact, in some instances the tense has been changed from the original, from present to past.
Dear Mardy,
… Too few people yet grasp what you have taught so well-that advocating the Wild is no narrow agenda. It is a broad concern for enfranchising the broadest imaginable community. It’s the upshot of the kinship [with untamed land] you said Olaus felt, … an antidote to spirit-shrinking consumerism. It’s conservation work that qualifies as the pursuit of happiness. Thank you for that! …
—Longtime family friend
Ed Zahniser, in a personal letter, 2001
After paddling the Kongakut River through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I visited the writer who so aptly conveyed the wild grandeur of Alaska’s Far North, making others fall in love with and work to save a place most people will never see.
I told Mardy Murie I saw tsunamis of caribou on the refuge. A thousand at a time, they rolled over and down a high ridge, migrating across the tundra, swimming across the powerful river. “Ah!” she said. “Such a wondrous presentation. So few people get to see that sight!”
“Wondrous.” Mardy had captured the Arctic’s reality with a single word.
In her autobiography, Two in the Far North, Mardy chronicled her romance with renowned biologist Olaus Murie, sharing their experiences of wild places and legitimizing the role of emotion in the process of learning.
Wonder’s twin offspring, humility and gratitude, whetted the couple’s appetite for knowledge. Their honeymoon was challenging—drawn-out days of dog sledding across frozen Alaska to collect caribou specimens. Experiencing the intimacy of discovery, they forged a profound connection with wilderness and each other.
In August 2002, the grandmother of the American wilderness movement celebrated her hundredth birthday and eighty years of defending wild lands. She declined People magazine’s request to profile her for an issue devoted to “American Heroes,” but Mardy was the nation’s touchstone for environmental integrity.
“Having been the basis for all our sophisticated society, doesn’t wilderness itself have a right to live on?” Mardy asked as a young woman in the 1920s. She repeated the question in the ’70s as she lobbied Congress to designate the Arctic refuge as a protected wilderness. But Mardy’s eye-to-eye consumption of nature and her talent for one-on-one discussion originated much earlier. Margaret Thomas inherited her “divine curiosity” from her adventurous family when she was young. She was parented by four of Alaska’s pioneers, all of whom helped instill in Mardy the desire to explore new frontiers. Her mother, Minnie, and father, Ashton Thomas, divorced when she was small, but her stepfather and, later, her stepmother joined her biological parents in encouraging Mardy’s sense of wonder. Shaped by these positive influences, her experience of Alaska was rich and joyous.
“Why,” her stepfather would declare, “if she fell into a creek, Mardy’d come up with her apron full of fish!” That blend of optimism and indomitable spirit fueled her behavior still, and the expression “What a divine thing curiosity is!” was a teaching tool, almost a mantra, for her.
Mardy’s earliest Alaskan memories were of Juneau, where she lived the first five years of her life with her father, mother, and half-brother Franklin. Following her parents’ divorce, Mardy and her mother moved to Seattle, where Minnie met Louis R. Gillett. After their wedding, the new family relocated to Fairbanks, where nine-year-old Mardy’s stepfather took on the job of territorial assistant United States attorney. Alaska’s daily challenges, its people’s self-reliance, and the landscape’s everlasting promise of adventure helped contour Mardy’s maturing mind, and in 1924, the same year she became the University of Alaska’s first woman graduate (with a degree in business), Mardy married Olaus.
