Margaret F. Merritt writes about her many adventures throughout the state, from the Arctic coast to the shores of Southcentral Alaska.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” is an adage that Margaret Merritt quotes in her memoir of her years conducting research with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. It is, by and large, exactly how she lived her professional life, which was far from boring. And in her lively and engaging book “Adventures of an Alaskan Woman Biologist,” she takes readers along for the ride.
By late fall Merritt was in Juneau working another temp job with the agency. From there she proceeded through a series of short-term positions until she finally achieved permanent employment. Working on a variety of projects and management programs, her career would take her all over the state, from the Arctic coast to the shores of Southcentral, from Glennallen to Nome, and to the populated cities of Anchorage and Fairbanks.
It’s in Kotzebue that the book’s charms fully emerge. Along with discussions of what she studied and learned, she recounts her adventures out on the land and sea. This included a mishap near Cape Krusenstern that could have easily turned fatal — not the first such incident she luckily survived unscathed. She also tells of life in that faraway Arctic community in the ’70s, and of her full embrace of the local lifestyle of hunting, fishing, snowmachining and more.
Merritt persevered there and elsewhere. She has every right to look back on those days with bitterness, but little of that emotion seeps through. She knows she blazed a path for women who followed, helping trigger the long and still ongoing process of change that made their careers less turbulent than hers.
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