How to Pee Standing Up: Rules for a Woman in Climate Science

Rule 1. Don’t Follow Your Heart

As a junior in college, I attend a Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) event and receive the first rule of working in male-dominated fields. Science professors sit around one corner of the table, students around another. Between us lies a gap of empty seats. We eat salad from greasy Tupperware or sandwiches from crinkling plastic bags. The student next to me vibrates the table with each crunch of her green apple.

In the 1970s, women made up only 10 percent of geology graduate students. Now, in the early aughts, that figure is over 30 percent. Regardless of the increase, the vast discrepancy between how many women are studying geology and the meager number in faculty positions is stark. I take this void as a promise of change, not a warning that women are allowed to go only so far. The imposter syndrome is in our heads. It’s an internal problem, not the result of the bias of teachers, or mentors, or larger systems.

“How many of you have children?” I ask. I don’t want children, or maybe I do. I ask as a metric.

After a long pause, a professor says, “Cheryl! Who isn’t here. She has kids!” I think, She isn’t here because she has kids.

A young woman with a brown bob says she is passionate about both social work and chemistry. “How do I decide?” She winces in anticipation of their response.

The professors look at each other as if they wish they could confer in private. One of them giggles. We all giggle. The professor who speaks doesn’t sound nervous or uncertain. She says, “I don’t think anyone here can tell you what to pursue. You should always follow your heart.” She smiles at us.

I sigh. I hear everyone else sigh. This, to me, is an open permission slip: you make your own life. I flicker to another state of being. Life is not a test. Our hearts, bold and loud in our chests, are true. We can trust ourselves.

A knock jolts us, makes us turn. An environmental studies professor stands in the doorway. Even though we look at her, she knocks on the open door again. She doesn’t smile when she sits in the open gap between students and professors. She spreads her legs wide and drapes her arms over the backs of empty chairs.

“No one tells a 20-year-old man to follow his heart. Men are told to set goals. If you want to succeed, set goals.” She looks around the room, not to make eye contact, but to make sure she has our attention.

I understand completely. Seize the day, carpe diem. Consume life in gulps. Go to extreme or remote field locations. Invent or build what you do not have. Run the most complex instruments. Stay on the cutting edge. And, if I put work ahead of everything else, I will be a scientist.
 

Rule 2. There Are Limits to What We Can Know

Thunder reverberates from the mountain dirt through the minivan wheels and into our teeth. The car smells of dirt and sulfur. I look at Bryan, my Ph.D. adviser, for reassurance, and he hands me the Nutella. I take a large scoop with a graham cracker. We couldn’t find a knife, but as with everything on this expedition, we make do with what we have.

Our van sits in the Forest Service parking lot by Emerald Lake, outside Leadville, Colorado. I started my Ph.D. program five months ago in Minnesota. For now, I collect lake sediment cores with Bryan. Where his research ends and mine begins is not yet clear.

On my first day of graduate school the program director asked if I had questions. No guidelines outlined the program’s requirements. The hope is to finish in five years, though I’ve met students pushing eight or nine. Another student in my department told me that when she asked her adviser about expectations, he said, “You have to fucking figure it out yourself.” I told Bryan this, and he laughed. “It’s kind of true,” he said.

I asked the director about qualifying exams. His bushy eyebrows merged when he chuckled. He said, “We want to find your limits. We will ask you questions until we reach the end of your knowledge.”

I look for role models, but while my department is large, there are only a handful of women on faculty. The youngest recently took a mental health leave from which she won’t return.

Rain pelts the windshield, smearing our view. I look out at the impressionist brushstrokes of dark green, light green, and steel gray: spruce trees, lily pads, and the lake. Onshore, our work platform, a four-by-eight-foot board with a hole in the middle, is lashed on top of two canoes.

A bolt of lightning streaks the sky. “Ugh,” Bryan says, but he grins.

“Bryan, we’re collecting evidence of change in the water level of lakes, but what if those changes weren’t from climate? What about the people who lived here thousands of years ago?” We want to know whether the water table fell, shrinking the lakes, when temperatures were warmer in the past. And if so, by how much? Knowing this can inform the design of climate models used to predict future droughts and wildfires.

Bryan uses a finger to get the last of the Nutella.

“Yeah. People could impact the land,” he says.

“What about beavers?”

“Yeah.”

“What about avalanches? Landslides!”

“Yeah,” Bryan is still smiling, but he hunches his shoulders and wedges himself back and away into the corner of the car door.

“What about a stampede of elk?” I ask. We’d slept under the stars a few nights before, and I’d woken to elk grazing around our soggy sleeping bags.

“Anna,” Bryan puts the Nutella on the dashboard. “You know, I don’t know everything.”

I look up at my teacher. I met him when I was an undergraduate in Rhode Island, moved to work with him, and now I schedule my life around his family. Sometimes I drive across town to meet with him at his house, where he spoon-feeds sweet potatoes to his baby while talking through my data analysis. Once, as I’m leaving, he lets me know his whole family has pink eye. He sets the rules. He is training me, teaching me to be a seeker of knowledge.

The rain is still falling, but the drops are smaller. Sunlight streams through the forest in long bright fingers.

“The Nutella is gone,” Bryan says in a somber voice.

“Yeah,” I say, but I’m listening to the ping of rain on the roof.

“Let’s get back to work,” he says.

I look out at the sun and rain. What keeps playing in my mind is the question of the limit of what we know versus the limits of what can be known. I wonder if our knowledge is limited by where our imagination falls off, as much as, or more than, it is by the boundaries of geologic preservation or technology. And what secrets does nature hold tight to, leaving no record for us to find and decipher?
 

Rule 3. Assimilate

With a wrench in each hand, I unscrew a three-meter metal barrel. “Green gray sediment with plant fossils. Oriented,” I scribble. The drill tower’s shadow falls across our workstation. All around our rig, the waters of Lake Bosumtwi glitter. We are in the middle of a lake about 30 kilometers from the city of Kumasi in Ghana.

Our expedition will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for two months. Each day costs tens of thousands of dollars, with funding provided by international governments. Our team is a mix of Ghanaian and American geologists.

I’d studied West African drumming in college, and I deferred starting my Ph.D. program for the chance to come to Ghana as a field hand. When I ask the head American professor how he came to be in charge, he describes a scene like a dogfight. Whatever story is found in this mud will be published in scientific journals of the highest regard. I had to promise I would not jump the line for access to the samples. They will not be part of my Ph.D. research. While my name won’t be on the publications, my handwritten sediment descriptions will fill the official record researchers use for decades. And the analysis will take decades.

I watch the Ghanaian geologists greet each other with a handshake that pulls away like melted cheese and then breaks apart with a snap! I can tell which Americans have been here before: they shake-snap.

A million years ago, a meteorite impact created the lake basin. The impact breccia seals the lake off from groundwater, meaning the amount of water in the lake reflects the balance of rainfall and evaporation. Scrawny tree trunks with bare branches stick out of the shallows: water levels are currently rising. Recent flooding has forced families to move. Fish fossils in the hills above show that the lake was even higher in the past. Layers of sand in the sediment cores provide evidence of ancient periods when the lake was lower. Reconstructing changes in the water level of the lake can inform predictions of whether future warming will dry out or flood West Africa.

Twenty-four villages ring the lake. The steep crater walls, once forested, are cultivated with cassava, cocoa, and plantains, plants familiar to me from the greenhouse where I worked in college. My first instinct when I arrived in the village of Abono was to walk the perimeter of the lake. I’ve heard it takes three days. The lake is about ten kilometers across. But we only get time off if equipment breaks—and only for as long as it takes to fix it. At night, tiny lights shine along one arc of the lake. The electricity was part of an election promise never fully realized.

Local Ashanti oral tradition holds the lake sacred, home to ancestral spirits and the spirit of the lake. A long history with foreigners and mining companies raises suspicion about so much effort to collect mud. In observance of tradition, we sacrifice goats and chickens before putting the drill rig in the water. This too comes from our research budget.

Our team is split into two 12-hour shifts. Each person shares a room with someone on the opposite schedule. At training, before the expedition, I asked who my roommate would be. “You are the only woman,” one of the head professors told me.

“So, do I get my own room?”

“We’ll see,” he said.

The first day I am assigned to assist a pale, pear-shaped American graduate student. He’s never worked on a rig before either.

“So, you are the only girl?” he asks. His tone borders between challenge and flirtation. “You know what everyone will be thinking after a few weeks?”

“About fucking you in the ass,” I respond.

The men apologize for swearing in front of me, pardon me, a lady is present, excuse me. I measure, label, and cap plastic tubes of sediment, keeping the cores in order. Fuck this, what the fuck, hand me that shit. We ward off malaria by cursing. Ward off the spirits of the lake whose mud we take, meter by meter. I swear, and the men, my team, start to forget I am different. By the end of our first shift, I’m no longer an assistant. The 25-by-60-foot metal rig is home.

The hotel maid sleeps on my bed during the day, the indent of her body pressed into the covers. My other roommates are lake sediment cores. The plastic tubes, each a meter and a half long, stink of sulfur and flake mud. My room offers additional air-conditioned storage. We have a shipping container lined with wooden shelves for the cores, but the container’s electrical wiring sparked a fire, and the climate control is unreliable. Cores take over my balcony. Cores fill the space under my bed. I restack piles of cores to get to the bathroom. It is a room of my own with very little space for me. In total, we will collect more than two kilometers of sediment from the lake.

Amid the plastic tubes, I think through the choreography of the Ghanaian handshake. The feel of flesh held and then let go but not dropped. The continued tension as hands slide and fingers meet. The satisfaction of a thumb played off a thumb.

A boat drops us at the drill rig at six in the morning and takes the night shift back to our recently vacated hotel rooms. At six in the evening, this happens in reverse. When the boat docks, we walk one by one down a gangplank. Children call out and we toss candy. On my shoulder, I balance three one-and-a-half-meter-long plastic tubes the width of my upper arm. “Hey, lady!” a tall man with bright white teeth and high cheekbones calls out. “White woman, you are now a Black man,” he says. He is not laughing: he is making a note. I look down. My pants, shirt, and steel-toed boots are covered in pipe dope, the black grease we use to lubricate threads on the rig. I scrub my skin until it is red and raw, but I can never get it all off.

With the feeling of a hard hat lingering on my temples, I go to the village bar. From shore, the rig looks like the eyes of a large creature in the lake. The bar is patched together with wood fencing, plywood, and metal scraps. Old men sit on benches. Children run through the crowd. I buy a Star beer and move into the heat of bodies. The young cook from the hotel dances with one knee up in the air. I sing along with the crowd, “one leg, one leg.” The Ghanaian highlife music spills out of the bar, and we dance out into the dirt road.

I dance with everyone and no one. Mostly, I dance with the throbbing night sky. I dance up to the cook. He puts his hand out, and I take hold. Life pulses back and forth between my body and his. Our hands slide against each other. I don’t see how it happens because we are laughing. Snap! I want to ask to do it again, but he is already moving into the crowd.

Back at the hotel, I have only a few hours to sleep. The pads of my fingers trace my smile. Fingers that have touched the imprint of fish bones preserved in rock hundreds of thousands of years old. That have gripped metal tools. That have shot simple curses. And now, that vibrate with new language.
 

Rule 4. Safety First

We drive through the land ocean of North Park, Colorado—sagebrush with gray mountain dirt between scraggly bushes. Virga, fingers of rain that evaporate before touching the ground, play on the horizon. The road winds upward. Spruce and fir tower above as we pass through the ecotone above which trees can grow and below which it is too dry. The road ends. We must hike the rest of the way.

This is my one day with a team big enough to carry equipment above tree line to American Lake, a key site for my Ph.D. research. Two U.S. Forest Service pickup trucks pull up. Their open beds overflow with summer staff and a dog. I cold-called the rangers in the winter when I was spending long hours in a basement map library looking for possible field sites. After several conversations about terrain, trails, and the possibility of renting donkeys, they offered to come along.

My adviser, Bryan, arrives next. Last year he moved to a new position in Wyoming. He assumed I would follow. I didn’t. Maybe it broke something between us. It definitely broke our lab—three rooms of computers, microscopes, and community. One of the undergraduates, the first in her family to go to college, left school. The other Ph.D. student, a couple years ahead of me, dropped out. I see that brilliance has nothing to do with completion. Bryan runs a personal marathon of science, inspired and slightly manic. He’s delighted for our company. But if I am going to finish, I am on my own. The practicalities of my education and career don’t fall into the scope of his mad dash.

We unload the equipment from the van and onto our bodies. As we start up the mountain, the dog runs ahead and then loops back to our group of about a dozen.

“Should we be making noise so we don’t surprise bears?” my labmate asks.

“You hear what they found in the bear scat?” a ranger says.

“What?”

“The hiker’s bells.” He laughs.

“Oh shit, not bear stories again,” the other ranger says.

“Fuck that. It’s smart to be afraid of bears,” I say.

We walk on, weaving our groups together, laughing and cussing. I make a mental note to leave a bottle of whiskey at the ranger’s office in thanks.

Forests don’t end in hard straight lines. At high elevation, smaller and smaller groups of trees huddle together with more and more open tundra between. We reach a plateau with only a few krummholz, trees deformed and stunted by the wind. In the thin air, the sky is blue infused with blue. Nothing is between us and outer space. A valley stretches ahead with the waters of American Lake. The Elk Mountains sweep still higher around the lake, like the sides of a steel bathtub. It’s July, but the winter ice on the lake broke up only last week. Patches of snow reflect the sun, making us squint.

We dump out our packs and pump up five truck-tire inner tubes. We lash the tubes together with rope and attach a thin plastic sheet with a hole in the middle. I look to Bryan for approval. He smiles, but his eyebrows form a V. He has not seen the platform I designed to be built on a limited budget and that could be hiked several miles. Before coming West, I talked to machinists, science elders, and coring experts. My field crew helped me test the platform on city lakes.

The ground around the lake is spongy, and my feet sploosh as I walk. White flowers with yellow centers and cabbage leaves grow in hummocks. What we want to know, the story written in the layers of mud beneath the lake, is whether trees grew higher in the past. We want to know if ancient periods of warmth, when the ice and snow melted earlier in the spring and later in the fall, allowed tree seedlings to grow in what today is tundra.

Bryan and I slip the platform into the water. A graduate student tows us to the middle of the lake, paddling an inflatable kayak. We anchor the wobbly mass of inflated tubes, not daring to stand up. I clip a pipe cutter and figure eight to the platform, so they won’t float away—water comes up the center coring hole. We set the piston that will hold the sediment in place and lower the metal coring barrel into the water.

We add rods meter by meter, until we feel the lake bottom five and a half meters below. On our knees, counting to three, we push. The ice-free season is short at this elevation, and biological activity is much lower than in the forest. This should not take long.

“Ready?” Bryan asks.

“Ready,” I say. Pulling the core out is always harder than pushing the casing in.

Kneeling, we clench our stomachs, shoulders, and legs against the suck of the lake bottom. Green water comes up over our knees. From here, the steel bathtub walls are anything but smooth. The slopes are covered in jagged rocks ranging from pebbles to boulders.

We have three cores of sediment when the yelling starts. It’s clear there is more mud to core before we hit the basin’s bottom. “What?” I shout. Onshore, our crew is small dots against the mountain. Bryan shrugs and we load the barrel for the next section. The kayak paddles toward us. “Lightning!” the paddler yells. I look up at the sky.

“What?” Bryan asks.

“Fuck!” I yell. “It’s only 10 a.m.” The team I’ve amassed is not available tomorrow. This is it. What we collect today is the record we will have. And it’s not just my research. All my cores will go into a repository available to the global scientific community.

“Lightning!” the paddler calls again.

“We have to finish this one,” Bryan says. Anchored in the middle of a lake with our feet in the water, a metal rod in our hands, we are trapped. We’re the tallest thing above tree line. I want to hurry, but there is no faster way to pull the equipment out of the mud.

“I thought we would be done by now. I’ve never seen a lake with this much sediment at such high elevation,” I say.

Bryan grins. “It’s awesome.” The more sediment the better for resolving detail, but now we race time—and the probability of lightning.

“The rangers think you should get off,” the paddler says.

A bolt of lightning strikes one peak over. I jerk. The platform lurches.

“It’s sunny here,” I whine. I want to stamp my foot, but I can’t even stand. I look to Bryan.

“Up here lightning can switch from one peak to another without warning,” he says.

“The folks onshore are nervous. They plan to start hiking down,” the paddler says.

Bryan looks at me, “Well, Anna, it’s your Ph.D. You decide.”

I weigh a story about trees written in mud against our human lives. I’m at a boundary, my own personal ecotone between student and leader. “Let’s keep going,” I say, kneeling in the cool water with a metal rod held up to the violence of the sky. I would prove myself in this way too. No limits.
 

Rule 5. Literally, Not Figuratively

Ashanti mythology explains science through human experience. Respect for the spirits in Lake Bosumtwi sets practices in place that regulate and conserve fisheries and water quality. The lake is meromictic, the water in the basin doesn’t mix, and almost no oxygen is present below ten meters. Below 30 meters, the water is completely anoxic, preserving annual layers of sediment that can be read like tree rings. In our cores, these layers look like the patterns in a tiger’s-eye gemstone. On occasion, the spirits of the lake send a steady wind in the same direction long enough that water piles up at one end of the lake, and deep toxic water wells up at the other. In the myth, the spirits use gunpowder. The fish jump, gasping for air as hydrogen sulfide rises from the lake’s depths. Fish float abundant on the surface, easy to harvest and good to eat.

I’m told fish kills happen once in seven years, or once a year, or only twice before today and in the 1970s. The science and the local information don’t align. Their scales or reference points or purposes translate contradictory stories.

A rare event, and I am here to see it. But I need to pee.

The ship’s portable toilet has been gone for several hours, taken to be emptied and cleaned onshore.

The men on the rig—as in, everyone but me—pee off the side. Not enough rain, and it starts to smell. For all our modern technology, our ability to see nanoparticles and explore outer space, we have yet to figure out fundamental and simple details like a system that ensures access to a bathroom. Of the four head professors running our expedition three are named John, one is named Chris, and none are women. It matters.

In the local village, work is divided by gender. Women collect water and firewood. Men fish. Women walk the hills with bright-colored cloths tied around their waists, babies on their backs, piles of sticks balanced on their heads, or branches across their shoulders with buckets of water on either side. Men catch fish straddling their padua, narrow slices of tree trunk paddled with bare hands or pieces of wood the size of playing cards.

The toilet on the ship had overflowed in the morning, sending a stream of stench running down the deck. Cleaning is women’s work, but we hired through the town’s “assembly man,” something like a mayor, and he gave jobs only to men. The boat trip alone, to transport the toilet for emptying to and from shore, will take at least two hours. I have no idea when there will be a place for me to pee again.

When I was at geology field camp on the Juneau Ice Field, the eight women in the 50-person expedition discussed how to pee on the open expanse of a glacier. Do you wipe with snow? Stay on your skis! An older student, normally reserved, blurted out, “If you just hold your labia back, you can pee a clean stream.” I went over the word labia again and again. I’d never heard it said out loud before.

If I can’t go to the bathroom, I’m not part of the team. I didn’t anticipate something so mundane could slam a door on me.

I find a piece of plastic drill tube and wipe the mud off with my shirt. The tube is about ten inches long and three inches wide. I unzip my petroleum-stained khaki shorts, put the plastic tube in the fly, and pull my panties to the side. I hope the dying fish are more distracting than me: a woman surrounded by men, a white American in Ghana, a scientist ignorant of local gods.

In this moment, I set a new goal. I will pursue research I can do on my own—no logistics so expensive and complicated they involve professors in dogfights or reliance on the broader scientific culture. I don’t want to be fitting myself into a woman’s body that then has to fit into a man’s world. I whisper, “Lay-be-a” to myself. The plastic is sharp, rough from being sawed off, but still, it is a relief.

Anna Farro Henderson is an award-winning writer, Ph.D. scientist, and environmental policy expert. The author of Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), she is a fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, teaches at the Loft Literary Center, and works in climate advocacy. She lives with her family in St. Paul, where she makes daily visits to the Mississippi River.

Read fiction by Anna Farro Henderson also appearing in Terrain.org: “Chiara, Chiara,” winner of the Terrain.org 13th Annual Contest in Fiction, and “Out Stealing Flowers.”

Header photo of Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana, by DreamBig, courtesy Shutterstock.