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Unnatural History REVIEWS 171 then goes on to catalogue some of the anced by an awareness of mortality. Aging things she enjoys: "A new collapsible pair or death is the background of many of of glasses," the "Clean up window" on the poems and the foreground of a few. her new computer, "a young mare / and But the eventuality of death serves, in fact, gelding frolicking like kittens," the sound to make our human experiences all the of "the brook getting in with / the white more precious. As a whole, the poems of swans at the black pond" (p. 66). The this volume are an affirmation of life. account of what pleases seems random They celebrate sensory pleasure, the small and list-like — and those are qualities of touching gesture, physical and emotional many of the poems —but that very ran- contact with others, moments of variety domness can be attributed to Thayne's and beauty in the natural world, and great powers of observation and her appre- allege again and again how much of expe- ciation for every aspect of life it is rience can be relished. In final analysis, humanly possible to enjoy. one can learn from these poems not The hopefulness of the poems is bal- merely how to survive but how to flourish. Unnatural History Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family From here, I simply follow the gulls west, and Place by Terry Tempest Williams (New past the Salt Lake City International York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 304 pp., Airport. $21. These direction-giving words (the bane Reviewed by Helen B. Cannon, a of geographic dyslexics, of whom I am member of the English department at one) came to me as a reverential reading Utah State University, a freelance writer, about spiritual landscape, where "red- and an editorial associate for DIALOGUE. rocks . bleed" (Williams 1989, 16) when you cut them. Come on, Terry, I SOMETIMES WHEN I GO to readings given thought. This is too much "sense of place," by Nature writers, that new and popular as Nature writers call their orienting-on- set exploring their private, half-mystical earth penchant. This is too literal a car- genre, I think for a moment that I'm lis- tography. tening to LDS general conference talks — But I was wrong. Refuge is unquestion- the histrionic intoning of truth on auto- ably not a formulaic book. It is, rather, a matic pilot —the sincere, paternalistic, book where the author, in spite of her- sing-song of lesson. self, transcends the camp genre of nature In the first paragraph of Chapter 1 of writing and, for the most part, moves Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge, at first I beyond the distraction of language call- thought I heard that familiar tone of sanc- ing attention to itself. Oh, nature is there timony and awe, even when the words all right, once we get past Temple Square gave only geographic, not spiritual, direc- and the freeway —not nature tooth and tions: claw, nor nature as fey or awesome, but When I reach Foothill Drive, I turn right, nature closely observed, drawn with a fine pass the University of Utah, and make artistic, scientific, and personal precision. another right, heading east [sic] until I No tricks. No sentimentalizing. No his- meet South Temple, which requires a left- trionics. hand turn. I arrive a few miles later at Nature here is "bedrock," to use Eagle Gate, a bronze arch that spans State Williams' own choice of metaphor. "I Street. I turn right once more. One block could not separate the Bird Refuge from later, I turn left on North Temple and pass the Mormon Tabernacle on Temple Square. my family. The landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my fam- 172 DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT ily, the two things I had always regarded to stay" (p. 4). This statement is touch- as bedrock, were now subject to change. stone and thematic, the image recurrent. Quicksand" (p. 40). But this is not Nature Terry does not retreat from her mother's writing, nor even nature as center. It is death journey. She does not flinch in the nature as counterpoint to another primary face of death, and she no more sentimen- subject. Go back to the book's subtitle, talizes that process than she sentimental- "An Unnatural History of Family and izes what is happening to the shores of Place." That direct taxonomic clue should the Great Salt Lake and her threatened, have given me accurate expectation. As it beloved Bear River Bird Refuge. T. S. was, once past that first incongruous para- Eliot's lines from Prufrock come to mind: graph, I realized that my initial preju- "I am Lazarus, come from the dead / dice was not justified — that this was, in come back to tell you all. I shall tell you fact, a book so honest and without pre- all." tense or artifice that I would not be able What Terry Tempest Williams, the to put it down. (Friends to whom I've messenger, tells is of her mother's long, given Refuge swear it's an "all-nighter," untimely sufferance. We see how cancer impossible to leave. Impossible to leave, transfigures Diane Dixon Tempest, how even after the last page is finished and she suffers radiation, but also herself the book shut.) becomes a radiance. We see how dying But if it is not mainly about nature, concentrates the mind and the life, not what then? The answer to that question only of the one dying, but also of those is no more simple than the book is sim- who love her best. I think Diane, with ple. For one thing, Refuge is about death, her attentiveness to life, must have wanted and dying that is not in the natural course to be sure she was alive when she died. of things; it is about the landscape (to bor- That is a strange comment, I know, but row a metaphor) of critical, untimely ill- in our culture most of us would rather ness — a lonely landscape where only a few hide our deaths from ourselves and hide intrepid companions can follow the dying ourselves from others' deaths. We view ill- and still return to bear witness. And the ness and death as shame. We refuse to set witness Williams bears is in league with limits, having become brainwashed by our famous sorties into that dark kingdom — own anything-is-possible medical hubris. James Agee's A Death in the Family, Susan Death sets a limit for each of us, but we Kenney's In Another Country, Barbara would deny that, and in our denial, ban- Myerhoffs Number Our Days, Susan ish the dying. We don't want to believe in Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, and Simone death. It's not even a matter of our raging de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death. I put Ref- "against the dying of the light"— it's our uge with the best company I know. It is denial that each life's light will be extin- that strong. Like the others, it is a book guished. Only a few refuse to turn away; written toward consolation, healing. "Vol- only a few return to testify of death and unteers are beginning to reconstruct the critical illness as capable of endowing life marshes, just as I am trying to reconstruct with its deepest meaning. Terry learns my life. Perhaps I am telling this from her mother to put by denial —and story in an attempt to heal myself. ... I willingly accompanies her mother on the have been in retreat. This story is my necessary path. Terry returns from the return" (pp. 3-4). journey with her mother to tell us. And Terry Tempest Williams is an Importantly, she writes as a daughter. unflinching witness. "When most people That fact, too, is more central to the book had given up on the refuge, saying the than nature. This is a book about moth- birds were gone, I was drawn further into ers and daughters. What Simone de its essence. In the same way that when Beauvoir writes as daughter, Terry Tem- someone is dying many retreat, I chose pest Williams also testifies. De Beauvoir's REVIEWS 173 words could be Terry's as well: "You do Mother to end" (p. 164). not die from being born, nor from having And there's her singularly honest use lived, nor from old age. You die from of metaphor. Not only are her own meta- something. The knowledge that because of phors good and true and revelatory, she her age my mother's life must soon come also rejects metaphors that cloud or dis- to an end did not lessen the horrible color our ways of seeing. surprise. She had carcinoma. Cancer. My This is cancer, my mother's process, not mother encouraged us to be optimistic. mine. Cancer becomes a disease of . She asserted the infinite value of each shame, one that encourages secrets and lies, instant. There is no such thing as a to protect as well as to conceal. natural death" (1973, 123). And from And then suddenly, within the rooms Terry's mother, "Terry, to keep hoping for of secrecy, patient, doctor, and family find life in the midst of letting go is to rob me themselves engaged in war. Once again of the moment I am in" (p. 161). The emo- medical language is loaded, this time with military metaphors: the fight, the battle, tional urgency in dying, the hard work it enemy infiltration, and defense strategies.
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