The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  Soon after, it’s time to make camp. We unroll the tent and spread it flat, thread the poles through their sleeves, and pop the ends into the grommets. Home appears, a bright orange dome tucked into a stand of willows. We’ve done this so many times that we don’t need to speak; one step follows the next. It feels good, knowing exactly what to do, unzipping the door and laying out the sleeping pads, bags, the books we’re reading. The sun warms the nylon wall where we tuck the bear spray. Everything we need and nothing we don’t, wallets forgotten in a dry bag with LYNX on the side.

  I crawl out of the tent to fill my water bottle, stepping over the mountain avens growing just outside. A small plant with a white, daisy-like flower, the aven means good camping, and legend calls it “the blessed herb, which stops the devil from entering.” Here’s home, for a while, a dry place on the tundra. We share it with wolves, one of whom surprises me as I crouch by the river. He locks eyes with me, evaluates, decides to move on, and lopes easily along the gravel bar, glancing back now and again. In the pause after he’s gone, I hear the hum of billions of mosquitoes. One clings to the tent screen, clapping her front legs.

  Brooding over these things, eyes scanning the tundra, I sense something strange taking root deep within myself, an insistent wriggle of thought I dare not speak aloud.

  This is midsummer, a powerful, auspicious time. The line between waking and sleeping is porous now, dreams more real than waking, hours of paddling front to back, front to back, staring at layers of cobble-striped light, sun vinegary on thin water. The clearest sign is the absence of a sign.

  Clouds race across the sky, and a rain smear hovers over the mountains, but we hear no thunder. You see her too, don’t you? The lone caribou staring at us from the gravel bar. Then the hawk floating overhead. Look at these piles of yellow hay drying in the sun, left either by arctic voles or ground-dwelling birds, and it seems vitally important I find out which. Sometimes I’m breathless with the sense of time tumbling past, but when paddling we’re caught in a moment that never ends. The shallow current tugs us north, the wind off the Arctic Ocean presses us south, and we’re caught, vertical needles pointing straight up at the coppery sky.

  Old accounts, written by sober men employed by the US Navy to map the coastal plain we’re traveling, tell of mirages so sharp that the men saw their distant camps hovering above the horizon. The angle of the light and the curve of the Earth made their far-off colleagues seem to walk upside down, heads to the tundra and feet treading thin air. The accounts speak of driftwood polished and old, and survey markers that turn temporary, tundra working the concrete loose by freeze and thaw, heaving the heavy plugs free. One afternoon I could swear we’re alone when a herd of thousands of caribou appears, crosses the river in front of us, and vanishes. They leave hoofprints in the dark sand, snatches of hollow hair, and a scent like beef jerky in the air. I’m the only one who can smell it.

  Months later, we’ll watch her pale bones appear on a dark screen: skull, vertebrae, and sacrum, what lasts longest of any of us. I’ll realize then that what I sought in the Refuge is as close and unknowable as my own belly. Images taken during the earliest days of gestation show a shape that resembles a tongue. Nubbled, bumpy, a crease where the spine will be. While I craved spinach and liver, her brain knitted together. While I paddled and paddled against the wind, shouting with rage and strain, her body was rocketing through a whole host of changes, and I hardly knew.

  Praised and cursed be the thread-legged horde, singers of the monotonous whine, filchers of blood, for keeping us always in the moment. They hatch before the snow melts, rise in clouds from the tundra, drive caribou onto snow-fields, and are ever with us, their hum as constant as the wind on the river. We wear head nets while eating, snaking spoonfuls of grub under the mesh as fast as we can and extricating our hands, bitter with DEET and pimpled with bites. They bite through our pants, our shoes, our neoprene socks; they bite through our head nets where the fabric brushes our temples. At night, we unzip the tent and roll in quick, then set about killing the dozens that have swarmed inside. Yet without the mosquito, the jaegers and longspurs and buntings would starve, and the wolf and the bear. They’re the wide base of the food pyramid here, billions of pounds of protein on the wing.

  We paddle past midnight and sleep until noon, and one bright morning brings me my grandmother, gone and buried under Ohio turf these many years and yet now, somehow, seated across from me at a table covered with a white cloth. We’re at a banquet, and the air between us hums with the low talk of other guests; later there will be a keynote speaker, but right now I’m telling her about some apartment my sister wants to rent. An ordinary conversation. I am so happy we can sit here and talk like this, I tell her, and she smiles. We hug each other and I wake shaken; I could swear she’s visited me.

  The light and water and cold shake loose everything I carried here with me—the cities of my adulthood, then the small town of my girlhood, and now the farm country of my childhood, vast ripples of green and gold, and stubble after plowing. Dark earth. My grandmother lived all her life in that place. She worked hard, borrowed trouble, made the best of what little she had. And foresaw things, both bad and good, before they could rightly be known. Her husband’s sudden death, yes, but also children, and other things I can never now ask her.

  Later, after watching a herd of musk oxen vanish into a stand of willows, I find a twist of soft underwool, qiviut, snagged on a bush and tuck it into my field guide to save. It would have been better, maybe, if I had left something in its place—not to pay for what I took, but to acknowledge a certain reciprocity. The Dena’ina, a Native tribe who live in central Alaska, teach that “when a person harvests a medicinal plant in the mountains, besides speaking correctly to it, he should also leave a small gift, such as a thread or match or bit of tobacco, in place of the plant.” What should I have given? A bone; a hank of my own hair? A pinch of loam from a fallow field; a thing that might, over time, become part of here? We pass clumps of dwarf fireweed, also called river beauty, whose purple florets are just starting to open. When the last blooms fade, people say, you’ve got four weeks until first snow.

  By this point in the trip, we are keeping it very real. We’ve been on the river ten days without showering, and the coastal plain is so flat, there’s not even a hillock for privacy. Between these physical demands and the conversations we have, we’ve become a band of three with our own lingo of inside jokes and games. We roll down the river singing songs from our youth, like “Eye of the Tiger,” “Purple Rain,” and our anthem, “Beat It.”

  Michael Jackson goes to work in that solo. He sings it all—lead, backup, and the offbeat hee-hees. But Eddie Van Halen plays the guitar solo, thirty seconds so indelible I bet you could lay it down right now. We did, barreling downriver, Carl howling the guitar line, David singing the rhythm, me whapping the side of the raft. The solo starts guttural and ends in a keening scream, and by now, a generation after its creation, it’s spread across the world, gone circumpolar, like some lichen species. Four verses and a chorus: some fights you win outright, others by avoidance. And then the knock on the door. They’ve come for you.

  It’s not the song so much as the contrast it provides, the gap between Michael Jackson and this wild place. It’s a way to be silly, a relief from the cold and exhaustion, and a distraction from the fear we seldom speak aloud. We’re paddling the Canning, the boundary between the protected-for-now Refuge and the disputed “1002 area”; we make camp on the Refuge side, and gaze across the river. It’s quiet now, except for the current and the gulls, but what’s next? What can we do about it? Right now, here’s what we can do: bear right, dig hard to slide past that gravel bar, and suck down enough air to sing the next word.

  We sing other songs too, but keep coming back to this one, and as we repeat its lines they turn almost tangible, calling up a feeling of warmth on my shoulders, hills sliding past, spray on my arms. I am not going to drown while singing “Beat It.” Here’s how the
body calms the mind: perform a repetitive task, repeat a familiar litany. In the old days, people built bonfires on Midsummer Night and danced around them until dawn. The only fire we have is the hissing Jetboil, but after we scarf the day’s last meal, we jig around the raft to get our blood moving and howl till we’re hoarse at the floating sun.

  Without trees, the mountains seem disproportionately high, and when we go hiking, land that looks smooth and unbroken from the river turns out to be boggy, tooled with gullies and seeps. So I find myself looking down, at things small enough to focus on, and discover lichen in amazing profusion. While David and Carl read, I go a-hunting for powdered sunshine, rippled rockfrog, and fairy puke. Here’s elegant orange lichen splattered across a stone, but no frog pelt or rock tripe, nor pixie cups, a club lichen that looks like minute goblets. Their species name, pyxidata, comes from “the Latin pyxis, ‘a box,’ perhaps because the tiny cups looked like miniature containers,” muse the writers of the wonderful Plants of the Western Boreal Forest and Aspen Parkland. “A pyx is a box in a government mint in which sample coins are kept to be tested for purity or weight. Are the tiny scales in the cups of this lichen fairy coins?” I recognize rim lichen from back home in South Carolina. Flat and bluish-white, it’s called “manna” by some. According to my book, “Local people believed that it fell from heaven, and in times of famine they followed the example of their livestock and used it as food.”

  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—and scientists studying lichenometry can uncover details about glaciation and what the planet’s climate used to be like. Lichen reveals the air of the past, too, taking heavy metals into itself and giving knowledge to those who know how to ask. Fabulous secrets, kept since the world was young, and I step over them, leaving them behind as I bounce across the tussocked plain, eating of bitter dock and looking for ragged paperdoll and granulated shadow.

  Something here sings to the body’s stony bones and wrinkled veins, pulls at the blood’s piling tide. The iron-rich stones wipe clean the details of the life I somehow used to know, with its rooms and its lightbulbs. Why had I stayed indoors so much? Why had I believed that it mattered what people thought of me? Taste how sweet is this chalky water straight from the river. Feel how good is this sleep in the blessed bag. Do you see it too, the plateau sliced into red books of shale, tangled branches of a rough-legged hawk’s nest, fox tracks? Sometimes my own name sounds strange to me. How could I need it here?

  Eventually, we’ll register for gear at the baby superstore, staring gobsmacked at the wall of wipes and rubber nipples and nail clippers kitted out with tiny flashlights. If only we were outfitting a trip to the Arctic, I’ll think. At least then we’d know what to pack.

  Memories of the truck stop at Coldfoot will come flooding back to me. A framed collage of disaster snapshots hung on the wall next to the pay phone. Big rigs jackknifed in a ditch; tow trucks loading a mangled SUV. Someone had pasted dialogue bubbles to the glass. Beside a crumpled Tahoe: “Will my insurance cover this?” A man chaining a big rig’s undercarriage for a tow: “Relax, I’m a doctor.” Gallows humor, exactly what you need when you’re halfway to Deadhorse. In for a penny, in for a pound; if the inclines don’t get you, the frost heaves will. But what can you do? You can’t stay here.

  Our last day. From afar they look like animals, but up close I see they’re oil barrels, dozens of them, black and rusty, left from exploratory drilling twenty years ago. It’s jarring; for two weeks, the only human-made things we’ve seen have been what we carry with us. Across the plain, in the distance, beads of light burn above Prudhoe Bay. Too easy to imagine drilling platforms here, gashes ripped by wide tires, a rime of frozen smog. I turn away from that and out to sea, the yellow grassland running up to the water’s edge and falling away.

  Piles of dry wood mark the tide line in silvery drifts. Here, where land begins, bear tracks mark the soft beach, and I step aside with an unconscious deference. These are barren-ground grizzlies, Carl tells us, smaller and less numerous than their Kodiak cousins, but hungrier. There are no streams jumping with salmon here, and they have to make do as best they can. The beach is littered with skull-pans and vertebrae of long-dead caribou, stained dark by the sand. The Arctic Ocean, what we’ve been making for all along.

  As for that deep-seated fear of being swept downstream: Cast it off, along with your grimy clothes, and run naked into water so cold it shorts out thought. Ha! Dog-paddle out to the nearest chunk of ice. Slap it, bob in the water, and swim back to shore, sand giving underfoot. Stagger out onto dry land and rub down with a little towel; stand bare-skinned on the damp sand, baying with joy. “What a rush!” I holler, heart booming in my chest. “What a rush!” Warm rays of sun on your back. An arctic fox’s bushy white tail. Telemetry station, steel pipe listing to one side; under-feathers from a snowy owl. And atop the rise, a graveyard with markers cut from gray wood. It had been edged with a low fence once, but now the palings lie on the ground, worked loose by animals or frost heaves. But the wooden markers are dry and sound, and the characters carved on them read plainly:

  NASON

  DIED

  FEB. 10 1933

  ANGOPKANNA

  DIED

  MARCH 23 1936

  JIM O’CAROOK

  BORN

  MAY 19 1933

  DIED

  SEPT. 4 1934

  An old whaling camp, Carl says, and I try to think what it might have been like for the people who lived here, keeping snug in sod-built homes, eating strips of blubber from bowheads they’d caught, bearing babies and trying to raise them right. We stand in the wind, looking out over the ocean stretching north clear to the Pole.

  Maybe the closer you get to the top of the world, the greater your risk of madness. Move beyond the life you once knew and into a new place that breaks with the past. Into this new body, arms lean and trembling, palms black from the paddle shaft, feet fluent in the safe path hid between stone and current. Into this place where the very stones grow bread, speak of ancient warm seas, crack open where yarrow sprouts. Cups smaller than a baby’s nail hold precious samples waiting to be tried; I assay the value of a thing by bathing it again and again in glacial melt, exposing it to sunlight for weeks at a stretch.

  And in the pink sky at 3:00 a.m., the sun floats, a pale bubble. We lie on the grass at Bird Camp; we’ll leave in the morning. Early July, and spring is just beginning to green the grass stems, though the wooly lousewort’s already blooming. 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.

  Morning. Coastal fog could have given us another day, but the air was clear, and the pilot skidded to a landing right on time. We loaded our gear and climbed inside, and the Beaver lifted, banking over the shallow lagoons lousy with loons, rising over gleaming braids of the Canning delta, the double lines that meant caribou trails, grizzlies’ brown humps. I grieved to go, and all that afternoon’s long drive back to Fairbanks I felt sensitive as a peeled egg as we skidded past hillsides of purple fireweed, gorged on gigantic Boo Boo Burgers dripping with teriyaki sauce, drove through rooster tails of road dust. On the radio, Bob Marley sang “Redemption Song,” and I worked hard not to cry. Won’t you help to sing. Our last hours together, our band of merry singers about to split. All I ever had. And somewhere along that busted road another heart started beating beneath my own ribs.

  The fluorescent lights in the all-night grocery store hurt my eyes as I hunted a pregnancy test to confirm what I already knew. We said goodbye to Carl and watched his van disappear into traffic. Something had ended.

  And something had begun. Back in South Carolina, her heartbeat pounded like wave after wave of skirling wind. Like that Arctic wind, coming from a far distance and hauling with it the chill of great change.

  I believed that land
scape to be far behind us, but during those lengthening nights I dreamed it close, seeing again the hills and divots I’d quietly named First Raft Put-in, Prince’s Purple Meadow, Hypothermia Beach, Mew Gull Bombing Range, Sunny Draw Piled with Hay. Campsite Where I Told David My Suspicions. Last Place, Which I Mourned to Leave. The Gwich’in call that coastal plateau Sacred Place Where Life Begins.

  Those musk oxen we watched in the bright midnight must now, early February, stand in clusters in the howling dark, as wind scours the snow from low places on the tundra and they feed on the grasses exposed there. Soft underwool streaming in the gale. So are you, my child, eyes opening and closing in the black. A glow now and then toward which you turn your face. I do not know when to look for you but what I imagine is a time belonging to no hour.

  In The Golden Bough, Frazer tells of people from Bombay to Transylvania who believed that unlocking doors and opening windows would help a woman in labor. Back then, men would unbraid their hair, uncork bottles, unlid pots. David and I prepare as best we can. If it would help to unsnarl the extension cords, straighten the garden hose, unclasp necklaces and lay them flat, we would do it. We crave something useful to do, a song whose every word we know by heart.

  It will begin after midnight, the old stories say. As the time draws near, I dread nightfall, and every sleep is surrender. I long for the constant sunlight we had in the Refuge, but it’s winter now, and darkness falls early. Here in our bed, David sleeps beside me. He will do what he can, I know, but mostly I’m in this alone.