Just re-read Joan Didion's My Year of Magical Thinking, and it led me to another book I've been meaning to re-read for years - Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, subtitled An Unnatural History of Family and Place. The book was published in 1991; I must have first read it a few years after that.
Terry Tempest Williams is a well-known nature writer. In the 1980s, Great Salt Lake rose several feet - enough to endanger bird refuges and nesting areas, not to mention roads, railways, etc. Williams is a serious birdwatcher, and she followed the birds' welfare with something more than interest.
During that same period of time, Williams' mother (to whom the book is dedicated) was diagnosed with ovarian cancer - her second diagnosis, having survived breast cancer when the author was a child.
Louise Erdrich (another author I love) described the book better than I could: "A record of loss, healing grace, and the search for a human place in nature's large design. [Her] courage is matched by the earnest beatuy of her language and the keen compassion of her observations."
Williams's prologue says "Most of the women in my family are dead. Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family. The losses I encountered at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as Great Salt Lake was rising helped to face the losses within my family."
Quotes from the book:
"Eudora Welty, when asked what causes she would support, replied
'Peace, education, conservation, and quiet.'"
A quote from her mother: "You still don't understand, do you? It doesn't matter how much time I have left. All we have is now. I wish you could all accept that and let go of your projections. Just let me live so I can die."[...]"Terry, to keep hoping for life in the midst of letting go is to rob me of the moment I am in."
" I watch the western grebes through my binoculars. Their eyes are rubies against white feathers. The male's black head-feathers are flared and flattened on top, so they resemble Grace Jones. The female is impresed as she swims alongside. All at once, they arch their back, extend their necks, and dash across the flat water with great speed and grace. They sink back down. They rise up again, running across the water. They sink back down."
If you read this book, do not skip the epilogue, "The Clan of One-Breasted Women." Williams is the matriarch in her family because of bombing tests in Nevada in 1950 - just downwind of Utah towns like St. George. Cancer rates in Utah jumped, and Williams's family were part of that man-made epidemic.
This really is a beautifully written book, and the handing off of sections between human story and bird story is very well done. It is an elegy in prose, for the women in her family, for the natural world, for her mother and her grandmother.
I have to tell you: I love this book.
