Book Review: Refuge

Title: Refuge

Author: Terry Tempest Williams

Date: 1991

Publisher: Vintage

ISBN: 0-679-74024-4

Length: 304 pages, including a bird checklist

Quote: “The understanding that I could die on the salt flats is no great epiphany. I could die anywhere.”

When does a young, healthy, happily married birdwatcher look at a favorite bird refuge and think about her own death? When family members, old and young, are dying. Terry Tempest Williams wrote, “I have known five of my great-grandparents intimately,” before years when one funeral followed another and “At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family.” The good news is that Refuge is not exclusively about mortality. It’s also about birds, and natural events that threatened the bird refuge, and a mother in her early fifties who doesn’t expect to have grandchildren but, if she does have them, wants them told that she is “the bird’s nest beyond the waterfall.”

Mrs. Tempest, the author’s mother, was one of a lucky few. After a diagnosis of breast cancer, she lived more than ten years before cancer appeared in a different part of the body. Observing the impact her cancer had on the rest of the family, Mrs. Williams thought that individuals don’t get cancer; families do. This observation moved past its intended meaning and became literally true as other relatives developed cancer.

The slow, painful death scene in Refuge is not allowed time to dominate the reader’s memory. The book moves us on. Bereaved people normally go through a stage of wanting to blame someone for the loss; Mrs. Williams found that blame for her extended family’s years of funerals could be assigned reasonably.

A popular protest song refers to “gentle, angry people...singing, fighting for our lives.” Terry Tempest Williams was such a person; Refuge is a gentle, angry, True Green book. It’s recommended to all who appreciate good nonfiction writing; and to all who care about the environment; and to all who think that environmentalism may be turning into a religious cult; and to all who have living parents, and need to be reminded to enjoy them while they can.