I’ve scraped the mud and gravel out of my steel-toed Keene’s the best that I can, and tug the plastic shoe condoms over the top to try to contain the mess. I know it’s an effort in futility. I’m just making a short stop back at camp to grab a cup of hot tea from the break room (spike rooms are what we call them), use the head, make some calls from my office, then head back out into the field. I’m coated, head to toe in mud. Not unusual this time of year. Most people assume that the dead of winter in the arctic is what I dread most. The time of year when we’re hitting temperatures of 20, 30, 40 and even 50 below. The coldest I ever worked in up at Prudhoe was ambient -65 with a windchill of -85. When it gets that cold, they suspend all outside work. Emergencies only. It’s because exposed skin can freeze in less than five minutes, and breathing air that cold can damage the lungs.
Nope. The time of year I dread are the shoulder seasons, late spring and early fall. The time of year when we’re in cyclic freeze and thaw. We can see temperatures at night in the minus teens, only to swing up to above freezing during the day. Meanwhile, the sun is shining almost 18 hours a day, 12 hours of it direct on the snow. This causes the top layers of snow and gravel to melt. The pads and roads turn into a quagmire of mud. Even though we are theoretically below freezing most of the day. This wreaks havoc on our equipment, particularly our electrical infrastructure. The winds blow the mud onto the powerlines, causing short circuits and outages. The permafrost heaves and jacks, causing buried cable to stress and snap. The crews then have to dig it up and repair it. I can count on being out in the field most of the day, answering trouble calls with the line crews in addition to my normal field engineering duties.
I make my way down the hallway of the old ATCO trailers that make up the office complexes. This bolted-together relic from the pipeline days, with wooden paneling lining the walls that was the height of decoration in the mid-70’s has seen better days, but there’s no where else I’d rather work.
The heat is cranked in the building and I unzip my muddy jacket as I carry my hardhat and ice grips down the hall, feet dragging with exhaustion after being out in the field all morning. Coming down the hallway I see her and she sees me. I’m suddenly self-conscious of my messy braid that I threw together 8 hours ago when I climbed out of bed in camp when my radio went off.
She flips her perfectly flat-ironed long blonde hair as she struts down the hall in painted on denim and 4-inch-high heels. I’m not sure which glitters more under the old florescent lights; her long, dangling earrings, her pink shellacked nails, or her glossed lips that are curled up in a smirk as she sees me.
Can’t avoid her, there’s no where else to go, so I smile back despite my weariness and I feel a flush rising to my cheeks as she looks me up and down and begins to laugh.
“OH—My—God, Daniella. What happened?” she says, putting her hands to her face.
I don’t have to look down at my mud-spattered FRC pants and shirt to know what she’s talking about. “I’ve been out in the field, working.” I reply, trying to extract myself from this awkward conversation.
She rolls her eyes. “You look terrible. Thank god I don’t have to go out in the field and get all—dirty.”
“Sure,” I reply. I hold my head high and I keep walking. I have a job to do.
I want to say a lot of things, but I bite my tongue. Why? Because I’ve been there before, and it would be like talking to a brick wall. I’ve had lunch with this woman (and talks with others like her). This is the same woman who complains that she doesn’t make enough money in her job and wishes she could make more. When I tell her or others like her they could become a technician or an operator with only a two-year degree and make more than I do, and have better job security, here are the excuses I hear:
- Oh, but that’s so hard
- I don’t have time for that
- That’s a lot of physical labor
- I don’t want to have to get dirty
- I want to be able to dress pretty and feminine for work, I don’t want to have to dress so drab (like you)
- That takes a lot of math, and math is hard
- I don’t want to be out in the cold or bad weather
I get it. I really do. Everyone has certain choices and expectations in life. Many of those, unfortunately are culturally embedded. But I know this. The choices we make or don’t make define our careers, our lives and our financial situations.
We see a lot nowadays about following our passions, pursuing our dreams. That chasing money is going to lead to a life of misery. At the same time, we don’t hear enough as women about choosing a career that can make us financially independent and stable. I was able to find that in my multiple iterations of careers in STEM. Some would argue that I was lucky somehow, I was born good at math and science. I would argue to the contrary. My luck was that I had educators early on that instilled in me a desire to learn despite the fact that it was difficult. That it didn’t matter whether I was a boy or a girl, that I just needed to apply myself. My other stroke of luck may have been my father. I had a father who was a power plant operator and a mechanic on the side. He would let me come into the plant with him on payday to pick up his check, and explain to me what the big generators and relays were doing. He would let me watch him work on cars (and even sometimes help). This instilled a curiosity about machinery and electricity that lives in me to this day.
I’m only a good engineer because I started out as a good technician. I worked my way to where I am now because I wasn’t afraid to get dirty and do a physical job. As a result, I can actually afford those nice shoes and life I want when I am not in the field covered in mud. I don’t have to rely on a man to finance it for me. I was able to chose a man to be in my life because I wanted to be with him and he wanted to be with me.
Due to medical circumstances beyond my control, I eventually couldn’t do the hard, physical part of the job anymore, but the solid technical foundation I had laid carried forward into the rest of my career, and made me the competent, highly qualified engineer that I am today.
All of this because I wasn’t afraid to get dirty.
