It doesn’t take much to dream of Alaska. So, today, I give two approaches to the same person in Alaska, from two different venues…
From a daily email I receive from Garrison Keillor at The Writers Almanac, 08/18/12
Today is the birthday of Margaret Murie (books by this author), born in Seattle, Washington (1902). She was the first woman to graduate from the University of Alaska, which she did in 1924, when it was known as the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines. That’s also where she met her future husband, Olaus Murie; they married in 1924 and spent eight months — a period they called their honeymoon — traveling around Alaska by boat and dogsled, researching caribou. Murie wrote a memoir of their early days together: Two in the Far North (1957).
Murie was instrumental in the formation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the passage of the Wilderness Act, each of which protected millions of acres of wilderness. She received the Audubon Medal, the John Muir Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died in 2003, at the age of 101.
John Denver
And from my favorite singer, John Denver also wrote of Olaus and Mardy…
A Song For All Lovers
I see them dancing somewhere in the moonlight
Somewhere in Alaska, somewhere in the sun
I hear them singing a song for all lovers
A song for the two hearts beating only as one
Imagine the morning no longer alone
The arms of another, a place to belong
No longer the struggle, no longer the night
And ever becoming in the quickening light
To see the darkness, to listen within
To answer in kindness, to ever begin
To ever be gentle, to always be strong
To walk in the wonder, to live in the song
In a place of enchantment where the wild things are known
Will the future remember when the lovers are gone?
And I see them dancing somewhere in the moonlight
Somewhere in Alaska, somewhere in the sun
I hear them singing a song for all lovers
A song for the two hearts beating only as one
A song for the two hearts beating only as one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2YaVldCIkQ