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Boreal Books

FAIRBANKS — Scientist – Logical. Dispassionate. Observer.

Poet/Writer – Emotional. Empathetic. Fervent.  Two highly opposite personalities. That’s usually not a problem, as this world functions well with people of all shades and hues. But when the two occupy the same body, that can be, well, problematic.

That’s the theme of Eva Saulitis’ biographical work, “Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist.”

How does one deal with the paradox of being a scientist when observing wonders of nature that just beg to be described in emotional, colorful terms not generally associated with science? How do you observe dispassionately, withhold judgment, when the soul inside is crying out at the injustice and sadness of things? Where does the brain let go and allow the heart to drive the boat?

Saulitis begins her journey in 1986, as she flies over Prince William Sound in a DeHavilland Beaver en route to her first post-college employment as a biologist at a fish hatchery. She has returned to the Sound every summer since, wintering first in Fairbanks and now in Homer — through masters and Ph.D. studies, after a divorce, during the Exxon Valdez fiasco — studying killer whales and their behaviors.

Saulitis’s essays recount her explorations, her research, her adventures and misadventures. For a girl who grew up in rural western New York, the whole Alaska environment is new and ever-changing. With no history of outdoor activity such as camping or hiking, she finds herself living in tents or on boats, “roughing it” on islands known to be bear habitat; her books begins with the butchering of a whale carcass on Montague Island. She writes of the people she encounters — Molly Lou Freeman, poet and biology field assistant; Dora and George, caretakers of an oyster farm on McPherson Island; elders from surrounding villages; and fellow scientists.

Being a whale biologist means knowing not just biology, but also understanding oceanography, weather patterns, climate conditions, local fish and birds and other species; it requires being independent and self-sufficient. Saulitis learns to read the Sound in all its incarnations — calm, agitated, and really angry. She learns the best places to search for killer whales is to listen to people around her — the Native elders who seem an integral part of Nature, the cruise ship operators who troll the Sound with tourists looking for whale adventures, fisherfolk who know the denizens of the deep intimately from years of working in and around water-dwelling animals, and the whales themselves which, after 20 years, become as familiar and loved as family.

And as befits a scientific artist —or is she an artistic scientist?— the essays aren’t just personal reflections and musings. There is a fascinating mix of biology, history, cultural anthropology, and bemused observations of personalities. There is also an awareness of her own foibles that makes those musings seem appropriate and spot-on. Through her words the reader sees the science of Prince William Sound as a dance of disciplines, each skirting in and around the other, with none tromping on the feet of the others, and all imparting a grace and cohesiveness that make them interdependent and inseparable. It’s stimulating and calming at the same time.

My favorite essay was “One-Hundred-Hour Maintenance,” in which Saulitis recounts the evolution of her skills as a boat mechanic. Since she lives and works on the boat, the “Whale 2,” in an area many hours removed from civilization and mechanical assistance, Saulitis must learn how to keep her boat going, how to know when something is wrong, and how to repair it if it does. It’s the typical fish-out-of-water scenario, played for laughs by numerous authors in the past. But Eva doesn’t play it for laughs, as the consequences of not being competent could be deadly, as many a fisherman and crew have found. But neither does she play it with gloom and doom. Her prose is smart, crisp, and matter-of-fact, and the reader learns along with Saulitis how to diagnose what’s wrong when the boat gets stuck in reverse.

What makes this particular essay so fascinating is the juxtaposition with Saulitis’s T’ai Chi lessons. Throughout the essay, as she becomes more and more frustrated with mechanical failings, she reaches back into her head and mentally performs her T’ai Chi movements, allowing her to grab onto a calm center and blow out her fears and anger as she does her oxygen-depleted breaths. In addition to the T’ai Chi, Saulitis turns to music to help her cope. As a long-time oboe player, she recalls musical passages and practices that keep her grounded and allow her to overcome the external and concentrate on the internal.

Saulitis lives inside her head. She crafts her words in her mind and shares them with the reader as a gift. Her imagery is amazing. She writes of a “hematite sea,” and describes glaciers as “ice tongues, another kind of memory.” Poetry in prose form.

Many of her essays touch on loneliness, even when in a crowd. I found myself wondering if the loneliness is related to being in her own head so much. “The moment was an anchor line holding us against a strong tide. This is what we’re like when no one’s watching, I thought suddenly, and then someone was watching and the spell was broken.”

In the end, this is about stories and the way humans use them. “We use them to make sense of the world,” she tells us. “Not all stories are true. Not all lead to wisdom. But we can lean from them. They can teach us something about ourselves, about where we go wrong.”

People hunger for knowledge, she concludes. “But knowledge without a story to tell, without advocacy for the living world, is cold and still, like knowledge trapped inside a glacier. People wait for it, for the glacier to force the story to its face, where it becomes recognizable, where it can make us wiser.”

Wisdom, is, in the end, the ultimate goal for all of us, including the scientists and the poets.

Libbie Martin is a freelance writer who lives in Fairbanks. She can be reached at lmartinburk@yahoo.com or 347-2422.