Intersecting Lives in a Larger Cause in Evan Griffith’s Wild at Heart
You know I’m mildly obsessed with storylines in which two lives intersect or run in tandem or seem to echo one another: Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary. There’s something deeply human about such stories of people finding their way in the world, sometimes against great odds, driven by powerful passions or convictions, in patterns that create meaning for us.
Evan Griffith’s tenderly written dual biography, Wild at Heart: The Story of Olaus and Mardy Murie, Defenders of Nature begins in his subjects’ respective childhoods:
Opening pages, image courtesy of Sleeping Bear Press
Anna Bron’s green and white landscapes offer delightful visual contrasts in this spread, while to a reader’s scanning eye, the lines in the artwork subtly link these twin stories across the gutter’s divide. A single mossy log fords a stream and then, left to right, aligns with another, extending its frosty length across the ice more than two thousand miles away. It’s the kind of visual magic that only a picture book can pull off, and it’s always a delight to find an artist who can intuit such a connection.
Growing up, Olaus and Mardy each fall in love with the natural world: here the text picks its way delicate through the passage of time in each of their lives, carefully selecting defining periods like Olaus’s travels in Canada and Mardy’s hikes past glaciers and bogs and fields of dazzling wildflowers. Their lives appear to be cascading towards one another, a nice feeling of inevitability cleverly wrought with a combination of words and pictures. It feels inevitable that “when Olaus’s work brought him to Mardy’s town in Alaska,” they should fall in love. I should add that a page turn and a few ellipsis points lead the way.
The merging story pans out from young beginnings to the defining achievement of these two talented people in a cause much larger than themselves—none other than the establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the passage of the Wilderness Act. Those big life markers are payoffs to a text that elevates moments of meaning. Throughout, the art remains sensitive to the mood of the text. Bron softens and blurs colors for the swirl of the Northern Lights, deepens the palette to browns and greys when politicians and miners resist the protection of wild places from an economy of extraction.
There’s a whole lot to learn from the way this text is set up, inviting page turns and leading the images to come. Backmatter provides additional information and context.
