Michael Cary grew up in a small farming town in northern Maine, just miles from the Canadian border, picking potatoes as a boy when school recessed for the fall harvest. The first in his family to go to college, he graduated from Bowdoin College and went on to earn masters degrees from Brown and Yale Divinity School.
A long career in education followed, as assistant dean at Bates College, teacher and dean at Deerfield Academy, admissions officer at Amherst College, Klingenstein Fellow and later lecturer at Teachers College Columbia, and headmaster at the Lawrenceville School.
Despite the rewards of bright, striving students and the beauty of carefully designed campus landscapes, Michael returned to work in the natural world he loved on behalf of one of Americas most pristine settings. As executive director of the Yellowstone Park Foundation, he gathered resources for Park projects and programs for which federal appropriation did not provide. Exploring Yellowstones wonders, working with and learning from Park Service Rangers, as well as hiking the Blacktail Plateau in winter, with gray wolves howling in the distance, all deepened his love for unspoiled wilderness. Driving small-town Montana with its diners that feature menus eschewing egg white omelets and working folk who regard you carefully then welcome you warmly, he saw what he had known in rural Maine.
Michael has loved the natural world and he has loved the classroom, teaching English, European history, art history, philosophy, and religion. All of this is in the sentences that make up the story of Monument.
Michael lives with Jane, his wife of forty-eight years, in Amherst, Massachusetts.