“Adventures of an Alaskan Woman Biologist”
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By Margaret F. Merritt, Ph.D.; RDS Publications, 2023; 292 pages; $18.
“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.
Merritt arrived in Alaska from Utah in 1977, fresh out of grad school. Like so many who have stumbled into the state, it was on a whim with no intention of staying. With a few months to kill between her final classes and her thesis defense, she came north for a summer at the encouragement of a friend in Sitka.
Needing to make ends meet, she took a temporary job with the Department of Fish and Game counting salmon on Chilkat Lake. The quiet life in a small cabin a few miles outside of Haines appealed to her, and after the summer ended and her master’s work in Utah was completed, she wasted little time making her way back for good.
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. And nearly every step of the way, she was the first woman to hold whatever her latest job happened to be. Not always a comfortable experience in what was then not simply a male-dominated profession, but a male-controlled one where resistance to allowing women into the fold was fierce and at times cruel.
Merritt’s story coincides with a period of growing pains for Alaska. Though no longer a freshly minted state, it was still quite young, and with the recent pipeline windfall empowering the budget, opportunities for a young and ambitious biologist were plenty. There was also much to be learned, and Merritt was a key player in helping Alaskans gain a better understanding of the fisheries that were and remain crucial to subsistence, sport and commercial interests.
Merritt does a good job of balancing her scientific findings with recollections of the sometimes tricky department politics and policies she had to navigate, as well as the lifestyles of the places she lived during the times she was in them. Through most of this book, none of the three elements ever overwhelm her account, creating a narrative flow that moves along swiftly.
Merritt hopscotched around the state from one position to the next. She went to Palmer, where she counted moose and beaver populations from the air. When that posting ended, she headed to Kotzebue — where, initially jobless, she found summer work as a fisheries biologist and a winter placement as a technician.
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 next took her acquired skills to her first permanent position in the Copper River Valley, where she added running a trapline to her outdoor ventures, bought a home in Glennallen, and volunteered as an EMT (in 1983 she was called to aid a gunshot victim arriving from McCarthy, a survivor of the massacre that was, at that moment, still ongoing, a mass shooting that left six of McCarthy’s 22 residents dead).
Merritt encountered plenty of sexism at each stop, but it was while studying shellfish in Kachemak Bay that it turned truly horrific. She was relentlessly and vilely harassed on the boat she worked on. Badly enough to quite legitimately fear for her safety. Far from sympathetic, her supervisors blamed her for not creating a “team atmosphere.”
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.
While in Homer, she found a parasitic worm infecting the eggs of king crabs and decimating the population. This leads into a firsthand account of the interaction of commercial and scientific interests in managing a fishery. Readers will learn much about this process from her telling of this and similar events in several locations.
The Exxon Valdez spill was a titanic event, and as state biologists poured into Prince William Sound, they left positions open elsewhere. This brought Merritt to Fairbanks, from where she tracked salmon on the Yukon River. Here her duties brought her into international politics as she worked to uphold the fisheries treaty between the U.S. and Canada. “My professional reputation was on the line,” she writes. “No pressure.”
Toward the end, the book lags a bit, but it’s not surprising given the context. By the early ’90s she had a daughter and was supervising research, and thus spending more time behind a desk. The adventures receded, and the final chapters mostly just detail projects she oversaw.
On balance, however, it’s a splendid book. And for those who think field biology is a cushy job, their misguided beliefs will be dispelled by reading about the serious labor Merritt engaged in, and extensive knowledge of the land and sea she needed to thrive in her career. She chose a job she loved, but contrary to her favored adage, she worked damned hard.
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