Required reading from Orion

Everyone ought to read the November/December issue of Orion magazine (subscribe here), and not just for Robert Dawson's photographs of abandoned golf courses being overtaken by nature, Barbara Kingsolver's evocative essay on knitting, or J. Drew Lanham's "9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher." ("Don't bird in a hoodie. Ever.") You really need to read "What the Body Knows" by Joni Tevis.

Why? Because I said so, that's why. 

In 2009 I sat next to Joni Tevis on a bus in Victoria, British Columbia, as she and her husband set off on their journey through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and I really wanted to drop my entire life and go along for the trip. This essay in Orion allows me, finally, to accompany them, if only in my imagination. You too!

I first encountered Joni Tevis in 2007 at the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. She read selections from her book The Wet Collection, and my first thought on hearing her read was "I need to buy that book," and my next thoughts were "My students need to read this book" followed by "My students need to meet this writer."

Which they did. Joni Tevis did a reading on our campus and met with my creative nonfiction students, and the next time I taught the class, she was unable to visit so we set up a Skype interview. I continue to assign The Wet Collection (here) every time I teach creative nonfiction because it inspires remarks like this one: "I didn't really understand creative nonfiction until I read Joni Tevis." 

So I was already a big Joni Tevis fan and I'm eagerly awaiting her next book, due out in 2014, so seeing this essay in Orion was like greeting an old friend. And then I read it, and it left me speechless.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to shut up.

Tevis excels at lyrical descriptive passages such as this one:

The river shapes us and our days. We sleep on its banks, drink it in chalky quarts, dip our cook pot into it to boil our noodles, soak our feet in the raft's self-bailing bottom. We bear right when we can and read the water ahead, trying to dodge the shallow places that send us swinging, or the shelves where water pours strong over submerged benches and snagging there means getting dumped.

But sometimes painful reality punctures the lyricism--mosquitoes swarm their faces, boulders the size of recliners trap their raft. In their isolation, she and her two traveling companions belt out rock songs at the top of their lungs, bonding over "Beat It" as the placid landscape rolls past. Joni examines the tiny growing things, seeking out "powdered sunshine, rippled rockfrog, and fairy puke" and learning lichens:

Lichen gnaws stone, making earth from raw quartz and flint. It grows slowly, sometimes as little as 0.02 millimeters per year--a hand-sized patch can be a thousand years old....Lichen reveals the air of the past, two, taking heavy metals into itself and dispensing hidden knowledge to those who know how to ask. Fabulous secrets, kept since the world was young, and I step over them....

Along the way, Joni discovers other hidden secrets I'd prefer not to give away. (Read it yourself!) Encounters with lichens, musk oxen, caribou, and oil drums lead her to contemplate the impermanence all that seems so solid: "All of it passing away--rivers carrying mountains out to sea, lichen eating stone, the spinning earth hauling the long darkness closer, one minute at a time." 

And yet in the end what the body knows is not death but life, not decay but growth. I've never paddled a raft through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and I probably never will, but when Joni Tevis takes the trip, there's plenty of room on the raft for all of us.