No Place to Pee

No Place to Pee is an intimate collection from a woman who spent 5,000 hours in a male-dominated industry.

Margaret H. Piggott, a retired physical therapist worked as a laborer in Alaska on the Klondike Highway and Alaskan Pipeline from 1975 to 1977. For the Klondike Highway, she worked on the brush-clearing, powder, and drill crews. On the pipeline, she worked in the shop at Chandalar, Beams and Anchors, detonating, culvert and insulation, and Butt List crews.

Piggott’s gender meant she had a rough time, right from her first footfall in Skagway, “a windy place with white caps on the water.” But she’ll tell you in the next breath that she also had good times on this rollicking adventure of risk and weather. Only the toughest women can work in this world, she discovered, but the pay was worth it.

This memoir, presented in diary format and written in quick, confessional bursts, captures the immediacy and survival of a lone woman in a man’s world.