She repairs equipment on the top of the world

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Nancy Boyce once thought she’d be an electrical engineer, working in an office for a big, high-tech company.

Then, out on a field project for a college class, she watched mechanics rebuilding the drive of a power generator. She was fascinated with the work — and suddenly far less interested in an office career.

“I abandoned ship,” she said. “I just said, ‘I’m going to start trying to find a job to do this.’”

More than a decade later, Boyce has done just that — and then some. She earned stellar grades in a diesel technician program and picked up a degree and multiple job offers from major companies. She became Caterpillar’s first female field mechanic in Alaska, tackling — and triumphing — amid some of the most challenging working conditions in North America.

In 2017, she was a nominee for the Association of Equipment Professionals’ Technician of the Year award. The same year, she won notice as one of the Alaska Journal of Commerce’s top professionals under age 40.

Today, Boyce, 41, is running her own business, PowerTech, in Juneau, Alaska. She specializes in power generation and heavy marine repairs, but she fixes anything and everything, from garbage trucks to fishing boats.

Never-ending test

Succeeding on her own — and in the kind of place where supplies can take weeks to arrive and the weather can stop everything for days — is a kind of never-ending test that keeps Boyce hooked on her work.

“In Alaska, because the land is fighting you every minute of every day, the people who are there have made, by and large, a conscious choice to pay for the beauty that is living here by being willing to fight the land every day,” she said.

In some ways, Boyce was cut out for this work from the start.

Growing up in rural Washington state, and later in Hawaii, she was an independent kid who relished as much in competition with her two brothers as in dreaming up plans and projects for herself. Perhaps inspired by her father, an engineer, Boyce loved building with Legos and Erector sets.

“I was fascinated by building and destroying anything in the house that wasn’t plugged in,” she said.

She excelled in school, although she often felt out of place among her peers. But once she realized she wanted to spend her life working with her hands, things started to click in a place.

The final push toward a career as a diesel mechanic came when Boyce was working as a millwright at a paper mill. When the mill shut down, employees were offered retraining benefits. Boyce took the money and enrolled in the diesel technician program at Clark College in Vancouver, Wash.

Quick study

She was a quick study, graduating in a little over a year with a near-perfect grade-point average. It was inopportune timing to head into the workforce — right as the Great Recession unfolded — but Boyce was fielding job offers left and right, from many of the biggest names in the industry. She knew many of those companies saw her as a way to diversify their ranks, and she was determined to prove that she’d do that – but also be among their top workers, regardless of gender.

“None of the dealerships I interviewed with had a female mechanic at the time, so I knew I’d be alone wherever I went,” she said.

She settled on a Caterpillar dealer in Portland, Ore., where managers quickly spotted her aptitude for electrical work and moved her to their generator division. After several years there, she decided to take her skills to Alaska, where the assignments she fielded for Caterpillar tested her mettle every day.

Going to the job site meant flying in to a remote village “in the middle of nowhere,” where someone was losing money every minute until their equipment was fixed — and paying a hefty price to bring in someone to do the work.

“There’s that pressure because of the investment,” Boyce said. “Am I good enough that people are going to say, ‘I’m glad I spent $2,000 to get this girl in here?’”

Especially at first, Boyce encountered plenty of people who immediately assumed the woman who showed up to fix their equipment couldn’t possibly know what she was doing.

“‘Are you kidding me, a chick?’” they’d say.

Later, once the work was done, many were apologetic — and grateful for her quick, proficient work.

“At the end, it’s like, ‘Let’s buy her a beer,’” Boyce joked.

Striking out on her own

It didn’t take long for people around Juneau to figure out that Boyce wasn’t just a female mechanic that they weren’t expecting.  She was a smart, level-headed professional whom they could trust with their toughest repairs — and one they sought out once she left Caterpillar and struck out on her own.

With her own company, Boyce is focused primarily on the heavy marine field: boat engines, deep water coolers. She’s the only power generation tech on her team, and she works on a wide range of boats, from cruise ships to fishing boats, private yachts and boats used in the mining industry.

On land, she keeps busy fixing just about anything with a diesel engine, and plenty of things without: RVs, garbage trucks, vans. On her Facebook page, one grateful customer has high praise for Boyce’s skills rewiring two pizza ovens. Boyce also dedicates a fair amount of time helping people — particularly women — who are down on their luck and need help.

“Anyone with a generator who is freezing in the winter and needs power, I will pay for it myself,” she said.

Those pro bono efforts helped put Boyce on the “40 under 40” list of young professionals in Alaska. (She’s particularly proud of the fact that she’s the first woman in a blue-collar job to make the list, which she said is usually reserved for “political people and bankers” and other types of professionals who work in office buildings, rather than out in the elements.

Inspiring hope

In Alaska, Boyce said, anyone who does the kind of work she does frequently has to get creative. When something breaks, it might take three days for parts to arrive. If there’s bad weather, that three days can quickly become two weeks.

“The ingenuity of some of these truck drivers to make a truck run using anything — I’ve certainly learned some Band-Aid, limp-home tricks from my customers,” she said.

Boyce is hopeful her success will inspire other women to take up similar kinds of work. When she advises younger women, she doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities of being a trailblazer. She’s been teased, taunted and sexually harassed, made to feel like she doesn’t belong in the kind of work that she’s excelled in for years.

But she says the payoffs make it all worthwhile. She recalled how her family and friends were incredulous when she first announced her plans to move to Alaska. They wondered aloud why she didn’t just get married, settle down, find a more predictable life.

She couldn’t believe they didn’t see her work as she did: a rare opportunity to hone the skills that can bring a broken-down machine — and someone’s livelihood — roaring back to life.

“I remember being shocked,” Boyce said. “Why would I get married when I could do this? I get a chance to be a hero.”

– Erin Golden

Erin Golden is a writer based in Minnesota.

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