The sunburned, imperfect and deeper wild of the human body.
Katie Lee, the “desert goddess,” in a
water-filled pothole at Llewellyn Gulch in September 1958. The folk
singer-turned-activist joined archaeologists and river runners on a raft
journey to document cultural sites and side canyons that would be
flooded by the Glen Canyon dam project. Now 97, Lee says, “I feel more
comfortable naked than clothed.”
Northern Arizona University, Cline Library (Tad Nichols)
The desert
taught me to be naked in the fall, I was 18, stepping nervously out of my
shorts and sports bra on the tamarisk-choked banks of the San Juan.
Above us, Mexican Hat rose tilted and precarious, looking less like a
sombrero than a red cartoon anvil set to drop.
Six of us stood barefoot in the mud: three women and three men.
“Let’s get naked and start the revolution,” one of the men said, and
charged into the river.
I hadn’t been naked in front of someone since I was a child. In the
sprawling suburbs of Chicago where I’d grown up, no one stripped down.
At least, my friends didn’t: If plenty of teenagers were whooping their
nude way into Lake Michigan, I was of the other sort — a
never-been-kissed teetotaler and youth-group leader. Nakedness seemed
inextricable from rebellion. It had to do with drunkenness, with sex,
which to me seemed both terrifying and wrong.
More than that, I hated my body. Since puberty, it had never fit in
the spaces it was supposed to go. It seemed impossible that someone
would want to see it. And while I could have chosen to prune and pick
and starve it into shape, my other option was to ignore my body
entirely, to let it grow and spread. I wore sweatpants to school, gave
up on school dances, and quit shaving.
But in this corner of the Colorado Plateau our bodies looked
different, slipping into the milky waters of the San Juan. Mine felt
different, too. I ducked into the current, feeling the cold water lick
along my armpits and between my legs, stilling my sunburn. Here, the
body fit: soothed, held, curvy and strong.
In the desert, beauty is the way a place has been tangled with: rock
thrust upward through the crust of the earth, terrifying pours of water
from a sudden-dark sky, tumbles of mud and rock racing downstream. The
desert is all stretch marks, a shifting old skin, ugly and devastating
in its resilience. And for every inch of it covered by detritus, another
corner is exposed, glaring whitely under the full moon. Small white
flowers erupt in last year’s wash.
Where I grew up, land was fixed into endless patterns of tract homes
and ball fields. We planted zinnias and marigolds in rows. What I
hungered for was the tangled thicket, the untouched marsh, but by the
time I reached high school little remained. Everywhere, strip malls
lined big roads. My classmates, too, seemed trimmed and predictable,
eyebrows disciplined into perfect arches; it was no surprise that I
disdained my own lumpiness, my unbridledness.
Nakedness was about rebellion, never about acceptance. But in the
desert, there was no one around to judge my body when I slipped off my
shorts — just these five people, and they seemed more concerned about
swimming to the other bank to sun themselves on the rocks. Perhaps it
didn’t take bravery to go unclothed. But I was still around; the
revolution in that water was not that others saw my nakedness, but that I
could let myself be. Somehow the sight of myself dimmed;
self-consciousness began to melt away. In a place where nothing was
plucked, it made sense that I could be OK as I was — ever-changing,
gorgeous with catastrophe.
In the years afterward, I would be joyously, obsessively naked,
baring my breasts comically off mountaintops. But I would also be
angrily naked, obnoxiously naked, naked to make a point, the way liberal
arts freshmen are wont to be. At my parents’ house in Illinois, my
mother called after me, “Put some clothes on! We don’t need to see your
naked body.” I was naked in protest of something I was just learning to
put a finger on, something to do with how deeply our lives were
sculpted, the way we required our bodies be trimmed and tucked and
hidden — our disdain for the animal form, our unwillingness to let both
land and bodies just be. In the context of my hometown, this new
self-acceptance seemed miraculous, like a boil of red mud surging into
the suburbs — and so I provoked, pushing back against the geography of
control, what I’d been told I was supposed to be and not be.
Later, I realized that I wasn’t so much trying to convince others as
straining to hear my own voice. I wanted to carry that sense of my body
as beautiful, no matter where I went. I wanted to hold some kind of
deeper wild, stretch-marked and sunburned, imperfect and stunning.
That first night we left the San Juan and slept high on a plateau,
surrounded by piñon and juniper, burning long-dead limbs into a sweet
smoke. The stars webbed around us, infinite and sharp. And I slept with
the full sense of my own animal, the way my body turned air and water
into the fuel for a day, the way bare feet gripped steep sandstone, the
perfect ways curves fit the contour of slickrock.
Katherine E. Standefer’s work appears in Best American Essays 2016.
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