Williams Refuge

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

The book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, tells the tale of two failed forms of refuge. The first failure is the failure of the Utah government to protect the birds of the state at Utah's Bear River Migratory Bird Sanctuary. The second failure is of the book's author. She fails to save her mother from dying of cancer. The author of Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams, is a Utah native and naturalist. She parallels the state's flooding with the difficulties she experienced dealing with her mother's terminal illness over the course of the book. Despite her love of the land and natural habitats of her home state and of the woman who gave her birth, she can save neither the land nor her mother. All she is left with is her profound sense of spiritual connection to her Mormon faith and to the beauty of the Utah desert that nurtured her as a child.

The failure of refuge from natural disasters such as flooding and cancer thus connects these two tragedies that give the book its narrative structure. One tragedy is public and the other tragedy is private. But Williams feels them both intimately, as both strike at her very core of who she is, and what she feels she is competent at -- her knowledge of the ecosystem of her state's natural habitats and her ability to be a good, strong Mormon daughter.

The tragedies have another parallel, however. At first both the flooding and William's mother's illness seem like accidents and freaks of nature -- but closer analysis shows that is a lie. True, the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Sanctuary by the Great Salt Lake was unexpected. But even if the flooding could not have been anticipated, at least the flooding could have been contained with a contingency plan, had the government of the state cared to spend the time and effort to do so. No one cared, however. The people of Utah were simply concerned with developing the outer lying areas of the sanctuary for commerce. The government was more concerned with money and policy than preserving natural life. As the river became higher and higher it became clearer and clear that because developers had overused Utah's land, its resident wildlife had nowhere to escape.

Likewise, Williams' mother's death at the age of fifty-three was also unexpected. As in the case of the flooded lake, at first it seemed as if there was no one blame except bad luck for William's mother's loss of her health at such a relatively youthful age. Six of Williams' aunts, William's grandmother as well as author's mother had developed cancer, all too young. Bad luck, and bad genes, Williams figured. Then, upon further examination of the area she discovered that countless neighbors in the Mormon community also had contracted cancer at young ages. Williams began to suspect that her genes alone were not the source of so many tragedies in the larger community of her faith and state.

After examining her national and family history, Williams came to believe that the 1950's aboveground detonation of a nuclear bomb near her family's home could be the source of her family's struggle with cancer, as well as the cause of the community's propensity to contract cancer as a whole. Williams details her feelings about this fact in a personal as well as a clinical manner. This is not simply a natural and historical tragedy, but a tragedy she must live with for the rest of her own life -- she will never have another mother, just as many of the flooded-out birds will never have another home. The author admits that the bomb she remembers seeing explode as a young child, the bomb that could have caused the cancer that killed her mother, haunts her in her dreams.

Thus her search for a source of blame for an apparently random act of sickness and suffering is not simply fantasy on the part of the author. It is based in clinical evidence. Likewise, the difficulties the birds experience are not like a random flood that occurs 'naturally' at times in nature. If the government had not allowed the over-development, the wild creatures could have found a home. As with the nuclear testing, the government placed life as a lower priority than money -- it was more important to test the bombs for the military industrialist complex and protect people from the Russians in theory, than to protect the future of the population's health in fact -- just as it was deemed more important to give people jobs in the short-term than to protect the environment to save human and animal health in the long-term.