My River Chronicles by Jessica DuLong

Author:Jessica DuLong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FREE PRESS
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

In my five years as a marine engineer, I’ve acquired a few strategies for managing the unwanted attention I endure because I’m female. When entering a new situation, I fortify myself against that look: A girl engineer? My chin locks. My cheek muscles tighten. My eyes steel. I find a neutral place to set my impassive gaze until people have appeased their curiosity so I can get on with doing my job. My blank expression opens no doors, offers no invitations, and that impenetrability allows me to get back to work faster. It’s a way of letting the awkwardness roll off.

A carpenter I once interviewed for a story about women in nontraditional occupations described it best: “It’s like you’re constantly on a catwalk,” she said. I knew instantly what she meant. She was describing that same weird watched feeling I’d had at the Slater during the first Hudson River trip. By this point I’ve grown accustomed to feeling like a caricature of myself whenever I step into a new environment. Jessica: Fireboat Action Figure . . . Now with Posable Limbs! But until now, the ways I’d been singled out for different treatment were relatively minor.

One of my first major lessons in how weird some men get about women doing “men’s” work came at a shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, in January 2003. Pamela (the tug captain from the first Hudson River trip) had hired Tim and me to come down to work on a 1933 steam-powered buoy tender named Lilac, which had recently been purchased by a preservationist group. Enlisted to help prep the boat for the tow to her new home in New York harbor, Tim and I were working to reposition an anchor. I had lifted a twenty-pound chain hoist above my head and was trying to clip the hook into a loop in the ceiling when two gloves reached over my head, grabbed the hoist, and yanked it out of my hands.

The gloves belonged to a yard employee known as Joe the Rigger. “Here, I got it,” he said, and I just stood there dumbfounded, frozen, my head racing: Well, it’s the yard’s chain hoist, maybe there’s some restriction about non–yard crews using yard tools. Well, he is a rigger—maybe he’s required to do all the rigging. Well, maybe he just needs something to keep him busy away from the foreman. I suspect, however, that Joe the Rigger would never, ever have taken a chain hoist out of a man’s hands. Period. Tim watched me turn red, but I kept my mouth shut, not allowing myself to fume until after yard hours.

“If it happens again, just take it back,” Tim counseled. “Say, ‘It’s okay, I got it.’”

The next time I worked in a shipyard, in Bridgeport in 2005, I was much less likely to have a tool pulled from my hands. Still, I braced myself. By then I understood what has been explained to me by multiple male friends when I asked for their help understanding the

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