Title: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Author: Terry Tempest Williams
Pantheon Books, 1991.
Evans Biography Award (1991)
AML Personal Essay Award (1991)
(Reviewed by Gideon Burton)
“I go to the lake for a compass reading, to orient myself once again in the midst of change.” So reflects Terry Tempest Williams, the powerfully sensitive narrator of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. She sounds like Thoreau in his statement about going to the woods to live deliberately, and like Thoreau, Williams finds a pace and perspective needed to manage the changes in the landscape of her life. She does find refuge, and invites us into that sacred space.
I keep coming back to this book. Williams (a naturalist) alternates between an observation of place (the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, threatened by rising levels of the Great Salt Lake during the wet year of 1983); and a more personal observation (her mother’s fight with cancer). Her scientist eye brings alive the birds in entrancing specificity: “We saw ruddy ducks…, shovelers, teals, and wigeons. We watched herons and egrets and rails. Red-wing blackbirds poised on cattails sang with long-billed marsh wrens as muskrats swam inside shadows created by clouds. Large families of Canada geese occupied the open water, while ravens flushed the edges for unprotected nests with eggs.”
Yet the birds are not so much objects of the environment as they are waymarks in her personal journey of loss: “How can hope be denied when there is always the possibility of an American flamingo or a roseate spoonbill floating down from the sky like pink rose petals?” I don’t know half the birds she refers to, yet I am ready to believe statements such as this, spoken with such candid authority and calm conviction.
Birds become mediators in Refuge, like angels halfway between heaven and earth, and they give to non-birders like me tangible, inviting ways to understand Tempest’s relationships with her mother, with the land, and with her belief traditions. This is a lyrical memoir, not a detached, scientific appreciation of the land or its birds. And infusing the entire book is a kind of narrative presence. Tempest is present to the pain of losing her mother, present to the details of life in the bird refuge, and in a kind of transcendental way, present to the divine within nature, as well as within her faith tradition.
That faith tradition is Mormonism, but for me (also of this faith) this Mormonism appears in a strikingly different idiom, challenging me in healthy ways. Williams quotes LDS scripture, pointing out the lyricism of a passage like that from D&C 88:44-47:
The earth rolls upon her wings, and the sun giveth his light by day, and the moon giveth her light by night, and the stars also give their light, as they roll upon their wings in their glory, in the midst of the power of God. Unto what shall I liken these kingdoms that ye may understand? Behold all these are kingdoms and any man who hath seen any or the least of these hath seen God moving in his majesty and power.
Infused with such scriptural personifications, Williams carries the scriptural poetry into her own views of the landscape, almost to the point of a startling animism or a potently divine feminine: “I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. … I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined.”
“I want…”; “I recognize” — We feel in such repetitions a kind of yearning to connect with the land and with her mother’s illness, and it shows up in Williams’ exploratory prose, filled with comparisons that reach, even overreach, and circle back for refining.
Take, for example, how she personifies the sand dunes first as masculine, then as feminine: “Wind swirls around the sand and ribs appear. There is musculature in dunes.” The ribs and muscles here almost feel like a creation story with Adam arising from the dust. She lets this image linger, then breaks into a new paragraph that begins with her revised attempt at exploratory personification, the dunes now seen as the opposite sex: “And they are female. Sensuous curves–the small of a woman’s back. Breasts. Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of Earth.” The broken sentences and single words show her both observing and testing, perhaps savoring the images she’s found.
These might be over the top comparisons, seeing sand dunes as primal human forms, yet it does not feel this way — not when Williams has been describing, in far less romantic language, her mother’s failing body. It is as though she uses language to superimpose, in mythic terms, her mother’s dying body into the living body of the land. In the process, it seems to honor both.
Williams’ sensuous depictions of the land do not come off as a kind of earthy feminism. The spiritually enriched landscape we see through Tempest’s eyes and feel through her skin is not feminist theology masked as natural history. The book is first and last a meditation on grief, a solemn reflection, a patient effort to connect, to re-see, and to redeem. Her mother is dying of cancer. But for Williams, there is a kind of dogged, calm optimism, an openness to life that comes through openness to death. Look at her redemptive description of cancer:
The cancer process is not unlike the creative process. Ideas emerge slowly, quietly invisibly at first. They are most often abnormal thoughts, thoughts that disrupt the quotidian, the accustomed. They divide and multiply, become invasive. With time, they congeal, consolidate, and make themselves conscious. An idea surfaces and demands total attention. I take it from my body and give it away.
Is cancer really a gift? Is creativity a cancer? Williams refuses to take refuge in old metaphors (like the military terminology used in “fighting” cancer). She makes us see the landscape, the birds, the divine, and the losses we tally in our bodies and our relationships all wrapped together, jumbled into a new and fresh appreciation, and all somehow suffused in an amber light, a peaceful light, a twilight that is not empty consolation but something more like the distant cawing of birds along the horizon.