The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [157]
Mardy’s new family greeted her heartily. Exhilarated and feeling grown up, Mardy spent the next three months learning the Alaska fisheries business, and also learning to row and use a compass as she explored the sound’s bays in a little boat with an outboard engine. The shoreline of the nearby Kenai Peninsula, where seine boats were working, was amazing; the mountains were vast and silent. “That first summer gave me a picture of that part of Alaska, a knowledge of camping stalls, and a respect for tide and storm,” she recalled. “We went through all the islands and their enticing coves. We hiked to the upper reaches of many of the islands. We watched a fight between a large whale and a killer whale.”12
After that summer, Mardy returned to Fairbanks full of Alaskan lore. Suddenly, learning the territory’s history and geography seemed important. Mardy wore boys’ lumberjack shirts and wanted to understand the mentality of stampeders who drifted into Fairbanks from Dawson. She wanted to know why the Tanana Valley, of all places, was the “garden spot” of Alaska. She took notice of pine grosbeaks feasting on frozen buds and berries in the upland spruce forests and woodpeckers scouring for hibernating insects under dark trees. She wondered about the smell of ozone after a big storm, and about the propagation of moss. Wild Alaska was a unique mystery to her. “Curiosity,” her stepfather said matter-of-factly, “that divine thing, curiosity. It will carry you when all else fails.”13 His words stayed with Mardy for the rest of her life.
Graduating from high school in 1919, the year Theodore Roosevelt died, Mardy enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Down the 375-mile Valdez Trail she trekked again, arriving in Port Ashton a few weeks later. From there she caught a steamship to Seattle and then the train to Portland. Feeling carefree, Mardy explored the Cascades and the Columbia River and studied hard at Reed College. During the summer months she returned to Port Ashton to work as a cannery storekeeper, watching birds forage for fish whenever she had a free moment. Ashton Thomas’s cannery business was doing extremely well. In his derby hat and three-piece suit, and with his pocket watch, he epitomized the successful Alaskan businessman. When Thomas decided to move to Boston for a year to develop better contacts in the seafood distribution industry, Mardy seized the opportunity to go with him, to experience the glamour of New York City and Boston. After two successful years at Reed, she transferred to Simmons College in Boston for her junior year.
II
Gathering her belongings in Fairbanks before heading east, Mardy was introduced to a handsome wildlife biologist, Olaus Murie. She was saucer-eyed at her first sight of him. Intense, steely, and bursting with talent, Olaus was in Fairbanks to be outfitted for an arduous trek into the Brooks Range by dogsled to study the habits of caribou in winter. On chaperoned dates Olaus told Mardy about his life as a wildlife biologist, camping under the spruce boughs and constellations. A pursuer of silence, he unfeignedly liked the privations of traveling where there were no roads but plenty of portages. Homelessness was his home. His precious dogs were all he usually had for companionship. Born in 1889—he was thirteen years older than Mardy—Olaus was blond and blue-eyed. Like so many great naturalists, he had been a bird lover since childhood. He was of Norwegian descent; his hometown was Moorhead, Minnesota; and his outdoors sanctuary was the Red River