The Beat Century — post 31 of 100. Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (1991).
Terry Tempest Williams braids her mother’s dying with the flooding of the Great Salt Lake, then closes with a claim that atomic testing killed the women of her family.
In the spring of 1983 two things began at once. Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer, and the Great Salt Lake began climbing toward record heights, drowning the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge north of Salt Lake City. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, published by Pantheon in 1991, is the book that refuses to treat those as separate events. Williams was a naturalist at the Utah Museum of Natural History, a woman who had learned to measure her own life against herons and snowy egrets, and the water came for the birds in the same season the cancer came for her mother.
The result is a book that has never quite fit its shelf. It is filed as nature writing and it is not really nature writing. It is filed as memoir and it exceeds memoir. What it is, structurally, is an argument made by juxtaposition: put a lake and a body side by side for three hundred pages and let the reader draw the line between them.
Williams was working as a naturalist at the Utah Museum of Natural History when both catastrophes began, and the book is written from inside that double vigil — hospital rooms in Salt Lake City, and a marsh going under a few miles north. Neither crisis waits for the other to finish. Cannon’s comparison places the book in a European tradition of unsentimental death-watch memoir rather than in American nature writing, and the reclassification is the most useful thing said about it.
The Table of Contents Is the Thesis
Williams organises the book by bird. Each chapter takes the name of a species, and beneath the name runs a subhead giving the elevation of the Great Salt Lake at that moment. The reviewer Helen Beach Cannon, writing in Dialogue, described this as “a taxonomy of water birds, with subheads giving measurements of the levels of the Great Salt Lake” — measurements that determine whether the birds in that chapter’s title have anywhere left to stand.
It is an unusually cold-blooded device for a book about grief, and that is exactly why it works. The lake elevation is a number. It does not care. It climbs through the chapters the way a disease climbs through a body, indifferent and legible, and the reader is made to watch two graphs at once. Williams never has to write the sentence that says these things are the same. The apparatus of the book says it for her, in feet above sea level.
A Mormon Daughter Learns to Disobey
The book’s tension is not only ecological. Williams writes from inside a Latter-day Saint family, a tradition she describes as training its members toward obedience, and Refuge is the record of a woman discovering that obedience has a body count. Cannon, reviewing the book for a Mormon readership, admitted she came to it braced for a sanctimonious tone reminiscent of general conference and found instead a writer who “bears testimony of power in the accurate word, the telling metaphor, the informed story” — a religious vocabulary bent toward secular precision.
Cannon also made the sharpest point available about the book’s genre: Refuge is finally not about birds at all but about a mother and a daughter and the approach of death, and belongs, she wrote, with Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death. The Bird Refuge is the instrument, not the subject. Williams says as much herself: “I could not separate the Bird Refuge from my family. . . . The landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my family, the two things I had always regarded as bedrock, were now subject to change.”
The Clan of One-Breasted Women
Everything the book has been withholding arrives in the epilogue. “The Clan of One-Breasted Women” opens with a sentence that functions as an indictment: “I belong to a Clan of one-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead.” Williams then names the cause. Her family were downwinders — Utah citizens living downwind of the Nevada Test Site during the atmospheric detonations of the 1950s, loyal people who did not question what their government was doing in the desert upwind of their children.
This is where the title turns. An unnatural history. The flooding lake was nature doing what lakes do; the cancer was policy. The epilogue closes with a dreamed act of civil disobedience, women crossing onto the test site, dancing at a bonfire, arrested. Obedience, the book concludes, was the thing that killed them, and the Mormon daughter’s refusal to obey any longer is presented not as apostasy but as the only available form of faith.
Why It Belongs in This Series
The Beats’ quarrel with America was a quarrel with a state that had produced the bomb and expected gratitude. Ginsberg’s Moloch and Kaufman’s abomunist absurdism are responses to the same fact Williams documents from ground level, decades later, with the medical records in hand. What she adds is jurisdiction. Where the Beat writers wrote against nuclear culture as a mood — a psychic weather — Williams writes against it as a specific series of tests on specific dates whose fallout landed on a specific family in Salt Lake City.
Refuge also extends the Western tradition the Beats worked in and rarely credited: the notion that a landscape is a moral document, that what happens to a marsh is legible as what happens to a people. Snyder argued this in verse. Williams argues it with lake elevations and a list of dead aunts, and the argument is harder to shrug off because it comes with numbers attached.
The Book’s Long Second Life
Refuge has become a fixture of American environmental writing courses, and its reception has shifted with the decades. Read in 1991 it was a grief memoir with an unusual setting. Read now, after three decades of litigation and compensation schemes for downwinders across Utah, Nevada and Arizona, the epilogue looks less like a personal accusation and more like early testimony in a case that was eventually, partially, conceded.
What has not aged is the structural nerve of the thing. Williams declined to write either of the two books she was obviously equipped to write — the nature book about a threatened marsh, or the memoir about a mother’s death — and instead insisted that neither could be told honestly on its own. That refusal is the achievement, and it is why the book still resists the shelf it gets filed on.
I belong to a Clan of one-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead.
Terry Tempest Williams, “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” epilogue to Refuge (1991)
Where to go next
Pair it with Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, which makes the same case that damage to land and damage to families are one injury described twice.
Previous: Lew Welch, Ring of Bone. Next: Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place — Wikipedia
- Unnatural History: review of Refuge — Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
- Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge — critical study (PDF)
- Refuge — publisher listing
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
