Refuge : An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Vintage)

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The only constants in nature are change and death. Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist and writer from northern Utah, has seen her share of both. The pages of Refuge resound with the deaths of her mother and grandmother and other women from cancer, the result of the American government's ongoing nuclear-weapons tests in the nearby Nevada desert. You won't find the episode in the standard history textbooks; the Feds wouldn't admit to conducting the tests until women and men in Utah, Nevada, and northwestern Arizona took the matter to court in the mid-1980s, and by then thousands of Americans had fallen victim to official technology. Parallel to her account of this devastation, Williams describes changes in bird life at the sanctuaries dotting the shores of the Great Salt Lake as water levels rose during the unusually wet early 1980s and threatened the nesting grounds of dozens of species. In this world of shattered eggs and drowned shorebirds, Williams reckons with the meaning of life, alternating despair and joy.In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.

Reader Reviews:

Although I found the passages about Ms. Williams relationships with her mother and grandmother and their struggles with cancer to be well-written and moving, I am surprised that she and many other reviewers imply that the cancers were the consequences of nuclear testing. I think of myself as an environmentalist, and I believe that such testing is likely to have been harmful to human health; however, the striking family history of breast and ovarian cancer in this case strongly suggests that there is a genetic disorder (mutation in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene) that was responsible for the cancer in these women. I was living in Salt Lake City during the spring of 1983, and the flooding was indeed dramatic, but I was bored by the rather repetitious descriptions of the refuge and the birds.This book is so powerful and so moving, it brought me to tears in more than one place. This is an amazing story of place, family, love, and the desert. Last winter I had to read one of Williams' books for a course and have become addicted to her writings. Williams is a Mormon naturalist who pushes the boundaries of both, and her unique insights bring a freshness to both faith and preservation. I have tracked down and read all of her books that are currently in print, and this is the most powerful of them. Terry states in another book, "The great silences of the desert are not void of sound, but void of distractions." This book is about the silences and the distractions of death, the death of her mother and of the bird refuge that she loved and that was her solace. The chapter headings are unique, written as a journal, but not by date but by lake height. As the Great Salt Lake rose to record heights in the mid-1980's, Terry's mother was dying of cancer, and the Salt Lake's rising was flooding the Bear River Migratory Bird refuge. The refuge was sacred to Terry as a place she and her grandmother would visit together, and as a place to get alone outside of the city to reflect, meditate and believe.
Terry begins the prologue with "Everything about the Great Salt Lake is exaggerated - the heart, the cold, the salt, and the brine. It is a landscape so surreal one can never know what it is for certain. ... Most of the women in my family are dead. Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family." pg.3. This book chronicles one woman's love of the desert, of the bird refuge and of her family. It tells the story of cancer clusters in the desert where the US Government tested thousands of nuclear devices from the 1940's to the 60's.
Journey with one woman, through disease, death, destruction and the desert; journey with her both through the physical landscape and the internal one, to a new place- a place of determination and desire to make change and to grow from all she has been through.
Terry states in the epilogue, "I belong to a clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation." pg. 281. This is a story of a strong woman who shares her pain, and her strength, to help us all see what could be possible with the triumph of the human spirit.Unless you have an intense interest in birds, that component of the book is rather dull reading. I grew up in Utah and remember the flooding. I have breast cancer that has metastasized so the reading of her mother's illness and death was poignant and painful to read.

I was disturbed by the author's distortions of the Mormon religion. She hasn't heeded her great-grandmother's counsel on pg. 197, "Faith, my child. It is the first and sweetest principle of the gospel." She has twisted the concept of obedience and doesn't recognize the great reverence and respect the church has for women and that women in the church have for themselves.

To her credit, she is "anxiously engaged in a good cause."
The scripture says, "he that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant...men (and women) should be anxiously engaged in a good cause and do many things of their own free will.." (D&C 58:26). This hardly supports her claim that the church discourages "independent thinking."

Her criticisms prevent her from appreciating the greater truths the religion offers, including God's marvelous plan for our salvation. I think her mother knew these things. In the narrative, the author admits that she does not accept her mother's dying the way her mother does, nor does she understand her mother's peace. By harboring her rage, I fear she never will.
Perhaps her passion/obsession for the stark desert landscape relects the emptiness of her own soul.When asked for a suggestion of a Utah author, a bookstore owner gave me my first copy of Refuge. I enjoyed the prose, giving each chapter space to be digested in my mind for an evening or so. As a wildlife artist, I adored Williams' discriptions of the birds she followed through the Salt Lake's rise and fall. Her marvelous relationship with her mother and other family members particularly touched me as my own mother goes through cancer. I got a chuckle out of another review from a male from Utah who did not care for the book. As a recent transplant to Utah, I have been continuously amazed at how egotistical male members of LDS seem to be...reading his review confirmed this thought. I have given numerous copies of this book to many mothers and daughters who are going though various forms of cancer or have a love of nature. Probably best not to give it to any Mormon males, however.Unless you are an avid bird watcher with an interest in birds and their habitats, you will find this book difficult to understand. It is even harder to piece together the ideas the author is trying to convey. The ideas are disjointed and read worse than the diary of a thirteen year old in how everything is organized. This book was a mandatory read for a class I took and I would not have read it otherwise. The reading is monotonous and a chore to continue. Although factual in its reporting it is difficult to understand what the author wants you to know. If the ending was placed at the begining it might provide enough incentive to continue readig the book.
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