Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist (Interview with Sarah Boon)
Sasha Bailey
As a field scientist in the snowscapes of Canada’s wilderness, Sarah Boon encountered all kinds of obstacles, ranging from falling ice to physical injuries, bureaucratic hoops, grizzly bears, and disrespect from her colleagues. Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all was a sudden mental health diagnosis that ultimately pushed her out of the field and into a world she’d always flirted with: freelance writing. Blending research with her personal experiences, scientific writing with creative, Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist explores the impact of climate change on glacial hydrology, the toxicity and sexism found in academia, and the role of mental health in choosing — and losing — one’s career.
As I was reading Boon’s story, I found myself enthralled by her admiration for the women who came before her and her unflinching honesty about the barriers both she and they faced. As she was battling weather and wildlife, vying to understand how and why Canada’s snow and ice is changing, she was also battling the undue expectations placed on women in science, her own mental health, and life’s more typical — but still unsettling — hurdles. Setback after setback, she found the courage to pivot and adapt.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Boon more in-depth about her experiences. We had this conversation over Google Docs.
Sasha Bailey: Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist explores all kinds of topics: womanhood, climate change, academia, mental health. Can you talk about what the title Meltdown means to you?
Sarah Boon: To me it means a couple of things. One as it relates to glacier change under a warming climate, with glaciers melting rapidly, especially alpine glaciers. They have lost 270 billion tons of ice between 2000 and 2023, which is a significant loss —especially for those communities who rely on glaciers for water supply, like in the Andes, the Himalayas, and even Canada. Meltdown also relates to the situation I was in at the University of Lethbridge, and how the departmental and research politics led to a meltdown in communication and belonging. Finally, meltdown refers to the mental health crisis that precipitated my exit from academia.
Bailey: You’ve been writing for your nature and literature blog, Watershed Notes, since 2012. How did these “musings from the shed” help shape your memoir?
Boon: I love writing my blog. It gives me ideas for what I want to write about in more detail. It allows me to practice and hone my writing craft. It helps me think about what I want to share with people, and then think again about how best to get my message across. These “musings from the shed” (which have changed to “musings from the back deck” because of rats (ugh)) helped me explore a few of the topics in my book. Women in science in particular, but also various aspects of my mental illness and how that affects my everyday life. It also helped me realize that I’m not “normal” like everyone else, in that I can’t sit down and write for five or six hours. I can do one hour, two hours max, before I get too tired. So I plugged away at my book and my blog very slowly, given my illness.
Bailey: You open up about some very intense and even life-threatening experiences in your book — the prologue begins with a particularly dangerous situation involving a grad student you worked with. You write, “No matter how much you hope it won’t, something always goes wrong in the field.” How do you go about writing such experiences without romanticizing or trivializing them?
Boon: I think you have to be honest and exacting with these types of scenes. You have to bring the reader into the story and make sure you have your facts straight. If you convey the urgency of the situation, it’s difficult to romanticize or trivialize it. Some people might want to trivialize it to downplay the seriousness of the situation, but I’ve always thought that the truth is important, no matter how damning it is.
Bailey: Meltdown is full of in-text citation and scientific terminology. It even closes with a full bibliography, an uncommon thing for memoirs. How did you decide what kind of research you wanted to incorporate into the book, and how did you make it so palatable to the average reader?
Boon: I read a lot of books when writing Meltdown. Two shelves of my office bookshelf are filled with books that gave me context and information. I wanted to write a memoir that was accurate and factual, but that would also draw the reader in: a science memoir. So I kept my footnotes to a minimum, basically to pinpoint key quotes and data. Then I added the bibliography so readers could dip into my sources as they wished. I didn’t want to snow the reader with lots of footnotes, because that’s not the type of book this is. First and foremost, it’s a memoir. Secondly, it’s a science memoir. That dictated the use of endnotes and the bibliography. But the memoir designation required that I write so that the reader could understand and even feel like they were there for my fieldwork adventures.
Bailey: During a field trip early in your academic career, you realized that “the mountains were [your] church, and nature [your] religion.” You also mention that you struggled to get some of your findings published because there was “too much story and not enough science.” How has your love of nature and your experience in field science shaped you as a writer?
Boon: When I was training to be a writer, before I gave it up and decided to become an academic scientist instead, I felt that I was good at writing science for public consumption, but struggled with writing scientifically. I love being outdoors, especially in the Rockies, but I realized I didn’t want to measure things so much as I wanted to observe and write about them. Hence the mountains being my “church” and nature my “religion.” I find that when I’m outdoors I notice things I never would have noticed otherwise. These days I hike at my local “mountain” (it’s pretty small as far as mountains go) and I always notice something different that I take a photo of. As a scientist, I’m used to making these observations. As a writer, I am shaped by these observations. They often spark writing ideas, which I can then pitch to different outlets or write about on my blog. I’m not trying to measure or quantify these observations; I’m just sharing something neat I discovered on my hikes.
Bailey: Your love of fieldwork is linked to your love of storytelling — you realize early on that you have to “read the landscape like a book.” What is the most important thing you’d like readers to understand about your experiences as both a scientist and a creative?
Boon: Science and freelance writing are both about observation and communication. However, the emphasis differs between the two. In science, observation is coupled with measurement, to validate observations and make sure they’re real. In writing, observation is often used to provide background for stories, to ground them in a particular time and place. Observation is also a way of generating story ideas. In science, communication is focused on other scientists. So scientific journals publish many papers that will only be understood by people in that discipline. This isn’t bad, per se, it’s just how science works: It puts you in conversation with other scientists in your field. As a creative writer, however, you want to reach as broad an audience as possible. You can’t afford to use a lot of jargon or acronyms, etc. So you reach for metaphor, simile, and other techniques to make the science more approachable.
Bailey: Sexism is still a major issue, and not only in the sciences. You write a lot about women you respect: the first female pioneers in the field of glacial geology, your mentors throughout your career, and your favorite science and wilderness writers. Who are some of your biggest female heroes?
Boon: My biggest female hero is, hands down, Rachel Carson. She wrote despite the turmoil in her home life, she wrote even though she had cancer, and she wrote from a place of deep knowledge from all the scientists she’d worked with over the years. Her books were broadly read and won awards. As I quoted from the New York Times in my book: “[Only] once or twice in a generation does the world get a physical scientist with literary genius.” This is what I strive for, to be a physical scientist with literary genius. I will never achieve this, I’m quite sure, but it gives me something to aim for.
My second female hero is Phyllis Munday, a Canadian climber from Vancouver. She started climbing Grouse Mountain when she was sixteen and took a lot of risks doing something young women “shouldn’t” do. She joined the BC Mountaineering Club as soon as she was eligible and climbed many mountains with them. She found a soulmate in Don Munday, a veteran she cared for at the hospital she worked at. They and a group of friends climbed together all around the south Coast Mountains, trying to find a way to reach the summit of what they called Mystery Mountain (now called Mount Waddington). She carried extremely heavy packs, she had knee problems like I did, and she was enamored of the small details in life, like the insects she collected for the Royal BC Museum. Her relationship with Don was highly reciprocal, the same as my relationship with my husband. We help each other out on hikes, as Phyllis and Don did on theirs. Of course Phyllis was honored with many awards and medals, while I have no reason to be. 🙂
Bailey: On the topic of sexism, you write a lot about your experiences with belittlement, disrespect, and unabashed bullying as a woman in science. Do you have any advice for women who are trying to navigate the “glass obstacle course”?
Boon: This is a tough question. It touches on issues of the difference between how women are perceived relative to men. If a man makes a good point, a woman making the same point is overlooked. Where a man is seen as confident, a woman is seen as pushy. Where a man is seen as ambitious, a woman is seen as aggressive. Women are more often asked to take minutes at a meeting and do “care” things, like organize gifts for administrative assistants. I don’t have any easy advice for women facing these issues. There are many universities where this is not the case, and one suggestion is to find a department where these things aren’t a problem. But sometimes you don’t know there are problems until you’ve been there for a year (this was my case), and then you might want to look for positions elsewhere. I think my situation was also because I was at the lowest rung on the ladder as an assistant professor. Once I got tenure (which I got just before I left), I would have more job security to call out those obstacles and make the department more welcoming to women.
I also think it’s really important to find a mentor. I had one at Lethbridge and she was invaluable. We became good friends and I still talk to her today, eighteen years after we were first paired up. She was there to support me when things weren’t going well, and I was there for her as well. So it was a two-way relationship, rather than a one-sided one.
Bailey: You write about how your gender, mental well-being, and physical health played major roles in some of the hurdles you encountered over the course of your career. Can you talk about the intersectionality of these roles, especially in respect to pursuing STEM?
Boon: My physical health was a recurring problem during my career, as I’ve had bad knees since high school. But at the same time as I had those physical hurdles, I wasn’t experiencing any gender or mental hurdles. This was also the case with the depression during my Ph.D. It was just one thing at a time. I didn’t experience the intersectionality of these roles until I was at the University of Lethbridge. There I had problems as a woman in STEM, had injured my knee again so had physical limitations, and I had a mental health breakdown. I think the breakdown was partly due to the physical injury and the department environment for women in STEM. You can only take so much before you crack.
Bailey: In recent years, a broader conversation has started about the connection between academia and mental health. In Meltdown, you open up about your own struggles with mental health in relation to the intense pressure you were under as a grad student. How can we reconcile the demands of academic study with the toll it takes on us?
Boon: I recently reviewed a book by Katie Rose Guest Pryal about mental health in academia, in which she notes that poor mental health is normalized in academic settings because so many people have problems that it just becomes “the way things are.” I think this is very true. We need to de-stigmatize mental health issues and make it easier to talk about them. I’ll bet that if you got a group of grad students together, they’d have a lot to say about their mental health and that of their colleagues. I really think we need to be truthful about mental health issues and show that it’s not okay to have to “just deal with them” because they’re more prevalent than we think.
I think supervisors have a large role to play here. Instead of getting your students to work harder, get them to work smarter. Let them build in time for relaxing and following creative pursuits. Make it clear that your door is open if anyone needs to talk. Yes, being a grad student is hard, but it can also be fun. The key is to find that fun, whether that’s in group activities or solo efforts. I felt like my side hustle of taking writing and editing courses really helped me manage my Ph.D. as I was doing something I enjoyed as well as the Ph.D.
Bailey: An unexpected mental health diagnosis put an end to your academic career, but it also opened the door for you to focus on writing. How did writing Meltdown help you process this difficult shift in your life?
Boon: When I finished writing the last few chapters of the book, which poured out of me almost whole, I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I hadn’t had a venue in which to articulate that part of my life before, not even on my blog. I thought it would come across as whiny and naïve. But I found my voice in the book to make it a mix of what was good about my experience (the funding for equipment and the fieldwork, for example), while not getting bogged down in the negative except to tell it like it was. I tried not to point fingers at anyone in particular, though I did in the end because I couldn’t write it truthfully without some finger pointing.
But ultimately writing those chapters completed the narrative arc of that part of my life and made me see how the decisions I made contributed to the negative experiences I had, and how I should have been braver in following a writing career instead of being an academic. It was important for me to see the things that happened because of my decisions, not always because of external factors. I also realized that I was going back to writing at a disadvantage because of my mental illness. As I noted above, I can only work for one or two hours a day, and some days zero hours. I feel like I gave my best years to academia and was left with the dregs to pursue writing. So I am a writer now, but I write less than I’d like to, and I request long deadlines so I don’t get caught with bad mental health days and suddenly am behind on my writing commitments.
Bailey: What are you working on next?
Boon: I’m working on a memoir in essays about training for a difficult trail run, and how I manage my mental illness during outdoor activity. It explores a series of themes around mental health and well-being in the context of the outdoors and shows how being outdoors isn’t the magical cure it’s often said to be.
