Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
by Terry Tempest Williams
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Book Summary Information
Author: Terry Tempest WilliamsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-09-01
ISBN: 0679740244
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Book Review: The following is a portion of Williams so called sacred rage
Summary: 5 Stars
Refuge, a truly moving book, ties family to natural history, tragedy and loss to human grace. It links the private anguish of a Mormon family dealing with the slow death by cancer of a loved one to the sweeping drama of a random cycle of nature. Disaster is at the center of this haunting book as the Great Salt Lake rises to break all records, submerging roads and driving the resident wildlife away, as the author's mother dies of cancer at age 53. Terry Tempest Williams in her book at times questions her Mormon religion, while portraying her own beliefs, and all of a sudden it seems as if she has created a beautiful religion of her own. William's, in her crusade to fight her family's anguish and to help the cycle of nature, is brought to the age-old tradition of nature worship. I recall William's ride to the Canadian Goose Club with her friend Sandy Lopez when they encountered two rude men at whom Williams felt a rage. Williams on the drive to the club said, "Men define intimacy through their bodies. It is physical. They define intimacy with the land in the same way." In response to that her friend Sandy said "Many men have forgotten what they are connected to"(10). Williams, after talking about men, was angered by their attitude toward nature, and their superiority over women. Her anger towards men was something that she described as her "sacred rage"( 11). Her sacred rage is and was women not having a voice in the Mormon religion, and men being superior over women while betraying them of all rights. An example of this is from the ride to the Canadian Goose Club when Williams was angered by two men. The man at the club, being a smartass, said about the killing of the owls that , We didn't kill'em. Those boys from the highway department came and graveled the place. Two bits, they did it. I mean, you gotta admit those ground owls are messy little bastards. They'll *#@! all over hell if ya let'em. And try and sleep with'em hollering at ya all night long. They had to go. Anyway, we got bets with the country they'll pop up someplace around here next year. (12) Williams believes that the natural world already had what she was looking for, and she considers those days sacred unlike the sacred rage she had within her Mormon faith. The idea of men being leader of the clan and women keeping quiet is more or less a tradition that has played a role in the Mormon faith. After hearing what the guy at the club said, Williams thought, "Restraint is the steel partition between a rational mind and a violent one. I knew rage. It was fire in my stomach with no place to go" (12). Williams, a woman who is somewhat looked down by the world of men, expresses her true self in her nature worship. She believes that nature can heal her wounds, unlike her Mormon religion which will not give her the same satisfaction. Williams says, "There is a holy place in the salt desert, where egrets hover like angels. It is a cave near the lake where water bubbles up from inside the earth. I am hidden and saved from the outside world. Leaning against the back wall of the cave, the curve of the rock supports the curve of my spine" (237). Williams feels that she can't express her freedom without her naturalistic faith. She calls Nature the faith that does not deprive her of any freedom. Williams, in reference to nature says, "this is the secret den of my healing, where I come to whittle down my losses" (237). In this excerpt Williams means that nature has come to aid in the time of loss, and that it is the true care-giver, hence her faith is in it.. A famous Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe, who wrote the book Hiroshima, a book similar to Refuge, said, "all religions are born of light". I agree with this author, and say that perhaps Refuge has given birth to a religion of peace. Williams as a woman growing up in a Mormon tradition in Salt Lake City, Utah, was taught to believe that the most important value is obedience. But that obedience in the name of religion or patriotism ultimately steals souls. Because of this Williams thought deeply about the issue of what is acceptable and what is not; and whether do we maintain obedience and law and when do we engage in civil disobedience -- When we can cross the line physically and metaphorically and say, "No, this is no longer appropriate behavior?" For Willaiams, the decision was that she should commit civil disobedience in order to get a voice in the world of Mormonism like the pentagon, and other male centered structures. Williams, in an interview with Mr. London, a journalist, said: "I think we have to stand up against what is unacceptable, and to push the boundaries, and reclaim a more humane way of being in the world, so that we can extend our compassionate intelligence and begin to work with a strengthened will and, imagination that can take us into the future" (London,www. 11-27-97). Williams wants to get a say, and break the tradition of men being supreme over woman. She is a charismatic figure, and one who won't give up without a true fight. I think of her as a true reformer, and one who would certainly break the old traditions of Mormonism. William's personality is not ordinary rather it is charismatic, and I say this because Williams has a way of convincing the public. Her pursuit to help nature and to keep hope in her mother was of great power, and I believe this task could not of been performed by any ordinary human being. The idea of being charismatic was not meant for women in her Mormon faith and this style of expression, I personally believe was the main cause for Williams drift from her faith and her move towards a naturalistic faith which was more pleasing to her. Williams, in the interview with Mr. London, says, Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from. Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identity ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built (London,www.11-27-97). Williams words are so beautiful that one can not realize without stopping and thinking what she really is talking about. She means that Nature, the religion and the faith of the wild, has something that other religions don't have, and that is to live in a personal state of mind. It is a religion that does not have a supreme ruler; thus it does not enforce a certain behavior. This wonderful culture that exists but we fail to recognize, is known as the ultimate faith. In her book, Williams points out the flaws in her Mormon religion which include its view of the supreme being, traditions, and many other related materials. Williams says, Where is the motherbody?...We are far too conciliatory. If we as Mormon women believe in God the father and in his son, Jesus, it is only logical that a mother-in-Heaven balances the sacred triangle. I believe the holy ghost is female, although she has remained hidden, invisible, deprived of a body, she is the spirit that seeps into our hearts and directs to the well...My prayers no longer bear the proper masculine salutation. I include both Father and Mother in Heaven (241). From this we learn that Williams has a grudge against her Mormon faith due to the fact that she and all women are being denied the rights of what they believe. I recall, when all the men stood in a circle to pray for Williams mother, and her mother remarked "Someday I hope that Terry and Ann and my granddaughters will be able to stand in the circle" (207). It is very sad to hear such words from a woman suffering from cancer.
Summary of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.The only constants in nature are change and death. Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist and writer from northern Utah, has seen her share of both. The pages of Refuge resound with the deaths of her mother and grandmother and other women from cancer, the result of the American government's ongoing nuclear-weapons tests in the nearby Nevada desert. You won't find the episode in the standard history textbooks; the Feds wouldn't admit to conducting the tests until women and men in Utah, Nevada, and northwestern Arizona took the matter to court in the mid-1980s, and by then thousands of Americans had fallen victim to official technology. Parallel to her account of this devastation, Williams describes changes in bird life at the sanctuaries dotting the shores of the Great Salt Lake as water levels rose during the unusually wet early 1980s and threatened the nesting grounds of dozens of species. In this world of shattered eggs and drowned shorebirds, Williams reckons with the meaning of life, alternating despair and joy.
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