The Retort

Refuge is a Melding of a Memoir and an Environmental History

March 25th, 2011 by Bailey Martin Of The Retort Staff

Terry Tempest Williams’s “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” first published in 1991, is a combination of a memoir and an account of the environment surrounding Williams’s hometown, Salt Lake City, Utah. The memoir part of the book is about Williams’s struggle with her mother’s cancer and death and her grandmother’s struggle with cancer. The environmental accounts are entwined within the memoir and the environment is humanized by Williams in an attempt to draw attention to its struggles.

The book’s quality is the result of its many strengths. Some of these strengths are Williams’s openness, the speed of the story, her writing style, and the way she entwines her private life and the life of the environment. I also feel that her writing is very honest and open about life, family, and her emotions. I think that it was very brave of Williams to write so openly - especially in her writing of her and her family’s battle with cancer and tumors since details of cancer are often hard to discuss.

Part of the reason that it’s such a good book is because Williams’s writing stays at an even pace throughout the book. It is a fairly fast-paced narrative which helps draw readers into it as opposed to books that frequently change paces which often deters readers. I enjoyed the way that she humanizes environmental problems by tying them to her family’s problems. For example, Williams says that her grief for her dead mother, Diane, was larger than she expected it to be. In her grief, “the headless snake without its rattles, the slaughtered birds, even the pumped lake and the flooded desert,” came to represent her family. (252). The headless snake represents her mother who had undergone a mastectomy and a hysterectomy along with other surgeries before her death. The slaughtered birds represent Williams’s family members and friends who have died from cancer. Nine family members had undergone mastectomies and only two members were still alive while Williams was writing her book. The Great Salt Lake’s flooding into the desert is symbolic of the cancer eating at the women.

I think that Williams’s writing and the way she ties the environment to her family is very original. I have not read any other books that humanize the environment in the way that she does. For example, after Williams’s mother has finished eleven months of chemotherapy, Williams and her family want to believe the doctor’s initial opinion that Diane is cancer free. However, a foreman removing boat slips from the lake foretold the bad news they will receive when he told Williams that “‘No matter what they tell you on the news, the lake’s still risin.’” (64). The foreman’s declaration that the lake is still rising despite what is being said links Williams’s mother’s cancer to the lake again. When the lake rises, her cancer is still corroding her mother’s body.

Williams’s does not say it in her book, but I came away from reading the book thinking that humanity, as it is now, is eating away at nature and destroying it as cancer is destroying people like her mother. Her book definitely makes readers rethink their relationship to the environment and the results of that relationship. She also made known the history of above ground atomic bomb testing in Nevada which I had not realized until I read her book. And the oddity of her family’s cancer history was also very striking. I think her objectives in writing “Refuge” were to make all of this known in the hope that readers would understand and rethink the relationship they have with the environment.

I think Williams was very qualified to write this book because of her family experiences and her background and relationship with the environment. Williams has worked at the Utah Museum of Natural History as a curator and naturalist-in-residence, the Teton Science School in Grand Teton National Park, and has been a teacher at the University of Utah and Dartmouth College. She also grew up in Utah and spent years studying birds at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Williams used her own experiences along with a balance of primary and secondary sources to write “Refuge.”

“Refuge” as a combination of a memoir and an environmental history strongly evokes the feelings of loss and grief that we might not otherwise feel for the environment. Only when these feelings for the environment are wrapped up with those feelings for a person might it be possible for them to resonate with us a strongly. I think it is especially hard for us to feel this way for a desert, which is often seen as an unforgivable and unchangeable landscape. However, after reading this book, I am better able to understand our effect on the desert. Williams’s humanization of an environment is a very effective method to draw attention to environmental problems. Williams accurately summarizes her book and her relationship with nature with her belief that “only the land’s mercy and a calm mind can save [her] soul.” (148).

I first read “Refuge” in Dr. Edgerton’s American Environmental History class over the summer and of all the books I’ve been assigned in college classes, it’s my favorite and I have returned to it many times since the summer. Williams’s connection to her hometown and the land surrounding it resonates with me because of its similarity to the way I feel about Billings.