Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

By Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Books, NY 1991. [304pp]

Reviewed by: Meg Wickes, Hospice Volunteer.

Terry Tempest Williams, author of prize-winning books that combine personal narrative and natural surroundings, was at the time of writing, Naturalist in Residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City.

Refuge gives a moving account of her struggle to come to terms with her family's, her mother's, marathon struggle with breast cancer. The author shares her compensating involvement with the changing bird population along the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Here, with the alternating surge and retreat of the salty waters she finds relief and gains the strength to bear the pain of her mother's gallant fight to live out her life on her own terms.

She alternates an account of her mother's ups and downs, her own emotional roller-coaster, their intimate connection with each other on a seemingly never-ending path to death; with an equally intense involvement with the myriad species of migratory birds, whose presence provides her with necessary refuge. This account of love and escape is told in moving and deeply felt prose that reads almost like poetry.

As the sub-title suggests, this book is really two stories. On the death of her mother and soon after of her beloved grandmother, the author begins to count yup the series of cancers in her family and their relation in historic time to above-ground nuclear testing at Yucca Flats.

In her words: "When the Atomic Energy Commission described the country north of the Nevada Test site as 'virtually uninhabited desert terrain,' my family and the birds at Great Salt Lake were 'virtual' uninhabitants." Here is the other side of this moving story, added almost as a postscript to this moving story.