08 December 2008

A River Runs To It

 

The author is at the oars of this raft as it roars down the Yampa River in the state of Colorado.

The author is at the oars of this raft as it roars down the Yampa River in the state of Colorado.

By Jeff Rennicke

An outdoors writer explains how rivers set him on a path to a profession.

Jeff Rennicke is an award-winning outdoors writer, who has lived a life of travel and adventure. His search for stories has taken him to the wildest places on five continents, travels he has chronicled in 10 books and more than 200 magazine articles in such publications as National Geographic Adventure, Backpacker, and Reader’s Digest, twice winning gold medals for excellence from the Society of American Travel Writers. He teaches writing and literature at Conserve School in Wisconsin and still loves to paddle rivers.

I am a writer because of a river. It wasn’t much, just a tired old stretch of an industrial waterway, but I could see it from my high school classroom. On days when the hands of the clock seemed glued in place and the pages of textbooks wouldn’t turn, I’d sit for hours watching the river, dreaming. Here was Ernest Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River where Nick Adams fished for a new start in life. Here was Mark Twain’s Mississippi with Huck and Jim lying on their backs aboard a raft pointing out stars with their toes. This small stretch of river was, on some days, the only thing moving, the pathway of my dreams, my ticket to the world that lay around the bend. And then one day the teacher mentioned Carl Sandburg.

“I know now it takes many, many years to write a river,” the poet wrote, “a twist of water asking a question.” At that moment, staring out the window at the river, my very own “twist of water,” I knew what I would do with my life. I would be a writer and I would begin by writing about rivers.

Author, adventurer, and teacher Jeff Rennicke

Being a writer is not the kind of career they tell you about at a job fair. It doesn’t fit neatly into the check-off boxes of any “occupational aptitude survey” a guidance counselor might give you. With writing you make your own path, find your own way, a prospect that is both frightening and exhilarating.            

In college while others were doing job interviews and internships, I was practicing an Eskimo roll in my kayak, paddling every chance I got, and reading, always reading – River Notes by Barry Lopez, John McPhee’s Coming into the Country, The River Why by David James Duncan. I knew in my heart that there were stories told in rivers, questions in the twisted currents, if only I could find them.

With a bachelor of arts in English/Creative Writing in the bottom of my backpack, I took a job as a river guide after college and set off searching – the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, Alaskan rivers with their banks stitched together in grizzly tracks, rivers with unpronounceable names and raging whitewater in China, South America, and Canada. I paddled them all, sat around the campfires, listened to the stories. Along the way, I learned about rivers, about time, and about language.

Wild rivers are more than just pathways of water from here to there. They are as much pathways into ourselves. There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace reminds us of other rhythms beyond the sounds of our own heartbeats, teaches us about the flow of an idea, the pace of a good story, the preciousness of time. I paid attention. I took it all in. And then I sat down to write.

As much as running wild rivers, writing is an act of exploration. You set off on a blank page to explore the mountains and canyons and rapids of ideas. You stare down questions and keep yourself open to the echo of answers, however faint. You hone your skill with a pen instead of a paddle, lay bare your soul on paper, and send it in to a magazine editor.

And they say “no thanks.” Or at least they do some of the time. But you try again – another magazine, another story. And then one day, they say “yes.” A magazine comes out with your name in it, your story, something that started with an idea as indistinct as the swirl of a river current is now in a magazine, a story, your story, shared with the world.

Then you do it all over again, and again. Within two years, I was writing as much as paddling, the money I made as a guide supplementing the money I made as a writer. Magazines began to call. Assignments came that took me away from rivers to other wild places – hiking among the giant grizzlies of Kamchatka, hang gliding off the Outer Banks of North Carolina, trekking in Antarctica. Soon I was an editor at Backpacker magazine and contributing regularly to the publications of the National Geographic Society. Magazine articles became books. Somewhere along the line I stopped defining myself as a river runner/writer. I had become a writer and the river flows on in words.

There has never been a better time to be a nature writer. Books and magazine articles, the stories we tell, have always been one of the ways we find our way through the darkness of uncertainty, a way to address the great questions of our time. With global climate change, increasing extinction rates, and the host of environmental challenges we face, the questions of the human relationship to the environment and our place in the natural world will be among our most vital literary inquiries, the most important stories that we can tell. There are indeed questions in the layers of rock on a mountainside, in the swirls of grass in a meadow, and in the “twists of water” as a great poet once wrote. And there are answers too, in the rivers, in the mountains, and inside each one of us, if only we learn how to look.