Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

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Description

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother used to be dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake started to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event used to be 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 non secular grace, resulting in a work that has transform a classic.
The only constants in nature are change and death. Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist and creator 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 results of the American government’s ongoing nuclear-weapons tests in the nearby Nevada desert. You will not find the episode in the usual history textbooks; the Feds wouldn’t admit to conducting the tests until men and women 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 throughout 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.

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