Emilie-Noelle Provost The Standing Approach

The Standing Approach

emilie-noelle provost

AJune 2020 article in the New York Times offers helpful tips for women who find themselves having to pee while spending time outdoors. “First, check that you’re not flashing anyone,” the article’s author, Jen Miller, writes. “Then find a spot that is clear of things like poison ivy, wasps nests, fire ants, and sharp debris . . . squat low to avoid splash back.”

When I started hiking in March 2019, after my mother was diagnosed with stagefour lung cancer, I didn’t realize that peeing in the woods was something women needed instructions to do, but some of the tips are helpful, if not obvious, such as “try to pee downhill.”

In early 2019, I was sadly out-of-shape, having worked desk jobs for nearly twenty years. But I didn’t start scrambling up rocks and climbing over fallen trees to improve my health. Listening to the soft rustling of hemlock boughs and beating the hell out of myself were the only things that helped me manage the white-hot rage and resentment that became my constant companions after my mother’s diagnosis.

AnnaOutdoors, a blog for women who climb, camp, and hike, gives detailed instructions for getting your clothes out of the way when peeing outside: “Pull your pants and underwear down so that when you squat they sit around [your] mid-thighs to knees. It is harder for the stream to clear your pants if they are around your ankles, and you are more vulnerable to tripping and losing your balance.”

This one also seemed self-evident until one day when I was hiking with my friend Liz. After an hour on the trail, she stopped and said that she had needed to pee since we left the car, but had been holding it because she couldn’t figure out how to avoid getting her pants wet.

My mother chain-smoked for nearly sixty years. She smoked when she was pregnant with my three siblings and me, and after her own parents died from lung cancer in the early 1990s. She refused to quit even when my extended family and I cleared our schedules in order to make casseroles and drive her to chemotherapy appointments.

Six children, ranging in age from two to twenty-one, called my mother “Grandma.” As a daughter, and especially as a mother, I sometimes still feel angry about my mother’s unwillingness to participate more fully in her cancer treatment. If she couldn’t quit smoking to save herself, why couldn’t she do it for us?

One of the reasons hiking helped me deal with my mother’s cancer is because in order to do it safely you need to be mindful of your surroundings at all times. You can’t think about anything else. Being in the woods also reminds me of when I was a little kid.

I have fond memories of the swamp near the house where I grew up. It was a great place

to look for tadpoles. I used to scoop the little guys up in one of my beach pails and watch them swim around in circles. Sometimes I’d tie a piece of string to a stick and pretend to be fishing. I was almost always covered in mud by the end of the day, and more often than not was not allowed back into the house until I took off my shoes and most of my clothes.

The first time I remember peeing in the woods was on a camping trip when I was six years old. My mother, who despised camping and most other things having to do with the outdoors, had gone on the trip reluctantly, but my sister, Nathalie, and I loved it. I can still remember looking at the moon through my uncle’s telescope and thinking it was magic.

I now know that my mother smoked, in part, as a way to help manage a severe anxiety disorder that went undiagnosed for most of her life. She grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, when even discussing mental health disorders was taboo. Until she was in her late 60s, my mother’s anxiety dictated where she went, what she did, and with whom she spent time. Most of her days were spent sitting at her kitchen table leafing through catalogs or in her basement workshop in front of her sewing machine. She rarely talked to anyone.

Peeing in the woods is especially challenging when there is heavy snow cover. Finding a suitable spot off the trail can be treacherous if you’re not wearing snowshoes, and even if you are it’s not uncommon to sink up to your knees with every step. If you squat down too low, you sometimes run into the issue my friend Sue refers to as a “snow bidet.” This is only funny if it happens to someone else.

My mother’s anxiety also caused her to harbor a deep dislike of authority figures, most of whom she believed were not to be trusted. This was especially true of doctors, but not without warrant.

In the early 1970s, an IUD birth control device passed through the walls of my mother’s uterus and lodged itself against one of the discs in her spine. This caused her debilitating pain. Her gynecologist decided that surgery was needed in order to locate and retrieve the device. They never found the IUD, but they did remove her appendix, just for the hell of it.

After a glass of wine or two, my mother would sometimes talk about how, while she was recovering in the hospital, one of the surgeons repeatedly questioned her about what she had done to cause the device to migrate.

In the late 1980s, after my youngest sister was born, my mother stopped going to doctors entirely. She managed to avoid them for more than two decades, until a few years ago when she contracted a serious case of pneumonia. The doctor who treated her suspected early-stage lung cancer might have been a factor, but she refused to be tested.

Several products that aim to assist women when peeing outdoors are now on the market. One of these is called a Shewee. The device, which is designed to allow women to pee standing up, consists of a funnel-like contraption, which is the part you’re supposed to pee into, and a long detachable tube that evidently diverts the flow away from your body. It costs fifteen dollars and comes in several fashion colors. I’ve looked at Shewee’s website, and for the life of me I can’t understand how the device could possibly make the task easier, not to mention that it’s just one more thing you have to wash. But I guess it might be helpful if you have to pee in the snow.

There’s also something called a Kula Cloth. The manufacturer calls it a “washable toilet wipe” (more washing). It’s antimicrobial, padded, and looks kind of like a potholder. After you’ve peed and used it to wipe yourself, you’re supposed to attach the Kula Cloth to the exterior of your backpack in order to let it dry. I’ve met women who swear by these things,

but I prefer the AnnaOutdoors method: “After you are done, wave your hips a little in the air to shake any lingering drops off.”

In September 2020, a few weeks before my mother died, we learned that her cancer had metastasized, spreading to her brain and nervous system. She could no longer walk, talk, eat, or pee on her own.

Nathalie, who is a registered nurse, took a leave of absence from her job in order to manage our mother’s medications and help her shower each day. Nathalie also regularly emptied the urine from the plastic bag that my mother’s catheter drained into. My sister is a warrior.

The sport of hiking has its roots in the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century, people who had the means began flocking to the woods to escape the dirt and noise of cities. From its outset, hiking has also been inclusive of women.

At their second regular meeting in 1876, the members of the Boston-based Appalachian Mountain Club voted in favor of allowing women to join. Women were also frequently among the earliest groups of hikers ascending peaks in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

In the 1820s, three young sisters, Eliza, Harriet, and Abigail Austin, became the first women to summit Mount Washington. They hiked up the Northeast’s highest peak over a period of five days and three nights, wearing long wool dresses, petticoats, wool stockings, and button-up shoes.

Last April, I summited Mount Washington—wearing a thirty-pound pack, a merino wool t-shirt, and a pair of Tubbs mountaineering snowshoes—in a little more than five hours.

One of the biggest potential pitfalls when peeing in the woods is what my friend Sue and I call “the standing approach.” This is something you need to think a lot about when you’re done peeing and are ready to pull your underwear and pants back up and continue on your way. If you’ve been sweating, and you most likely have, it can be extremely difficult—nearly impossible in the summer— to get your damp hiking clothes back up over your sweaty thighs. Forget it if you’re wearing yoga pants. Your standing approach needs to be timed just right in order to avoid being seen by other hikers while you’re hopping up and down half naked trying to make yourself right again.

My mother always stressed the importance of being ladylike and polite. Swearing and “bathroom talk” were frowned upon, as were certain wardrobe oversights, such as letting your bra strap show. For most of my life, I dreaded saying or doing anything that might upset or offend another person, even at my own expense.

For the first time in my life I’m healthy and strong. I’ve lost so much weight that people I’ve known for years often don’t recognize me. Even my husband sometimes has trouble finding me in the grocery store. I never hesitate anymore to tell people my opinion, and am no longer worried about what someone might think if they catch me changing my clothes in the car after I’ve been hiking. Nothing is worth having to wear a wet sports bra.

I’m pretty sure my mother never hiked anywhere, but she used to like it when I would text her pictures of wildflowers or views from the tops of mountains. Last summer, when I hiked to the summit of Bondcliff during a twenty-mile traverse of New Hampshire’s Pemigewasset Wilderness—the last of the state’s forty-eight four-thousand-footers I needed to climb in order to complete the list—I wore a locket with her ashes in it around

my neck.

According to Nathalie, a few minutes before my mother died, more than a dozen mourning doves flew down and perched on the porch railing outside her bedroom window. When she saw the birds, Nathalie told her it was time to go, that the doves had come to bring her home.

Sometimes I wonder where they took her, and whether the doves I see sometimes on the trail might know.

Alissa Bell, the author of a September 2021 article on the Exploring Wild blog titled “14 Ways to Pee in the Woods for Women,” offers this advice: “Don’t dribble. Commit! It’s more likely the stream will go straight (instead of dribbling places we don’t want it) if you let it out fast.”

I couldn’t agree more.

SECTION VII

THE JACK KEROUAC CENTENNIAL

1922-2022

“It was in Centralville I was born . . . .”

The Jack Kerouac Commemorative (detail), Lowell, Massachusetts. Photo © 1989 John Suiter, All Rights Reserved