It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on.

If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found.

While visiting my family in Colorado over the holidays, I found Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge on my mother’s bookshelf. I found it on my mother’s bookshelf in the dining area. Not the floor to ceiling bookshelf in the living room, or the long, squat built-in located in the hallway, but in the dining area, squished between other slim volumes that appeared in haphazard order.

Like me, my mother is an incessant book collector. Unlike me, she hoards books of the spirituality and nature persuasion. I’m the literary fiction and political science type. Needless to say, it’s not often I find much of interest on her shelves. That I stumbled across Refuge in the midst of her paperback jungle is surprising. That I wrenched it out, read the back, opened the cover, and sat down with it, is not.

Between the smoky orange cover, the expectant title in bold, black letters, and the promise that what inside contained a eulogy to place, I was hooked without ever having read a page. I sat down next to my mother on the sofa, where she was sorting weeks worth of mail, and stared at the landscape on the cover.

Set in and around Utah’s Great Salt Lake, Refuge is not only a testament to migratory birds and their loss of habit during the great flood of 1983. It is a tribute to her family, to its women especially, and to her mother, who, at the same time the lake was rising to record heights, began her own battle with nature. For her, it was cancer.

I’m going to borrow this, I told my mother.

It put me to sleep, she said.

I noticed she’d only gotten to page 64. I removed her bookmarker and placed it at the end. Within ten minutes, however, my eyes were closed.

I told you, she said.

It was true. The narrative did have a lulling effect. But not, for me, in the way she described. The prose was beautiful, mesmerizing. I wanted the solitude I could only find behind closed eyes to savor it. I wanted to take the perceptible sadness and experience it without looking into the half dozen lights burning in the living room. I wanted to daydream of my own desert landscape.

I did, eventually open my eyes. And though I didn’t finish the book that night, I did stick with it. No. I did more than stick with it. I relished every bit. I treasured it. After finishing a chapter, I’d close the cover and hug the book to my chest. In fear of what was to happen. In awe of the author’s strength to overcome it. In love with the fact that, like me, the author finds her center, and its opposite, in nature. But not just nature. Place. And one place in specific. For Terry Tempest Williams, Great Salt Lake and the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge are akin to family. They are part of what made her, as well as a part of what tested her family and her faith. And the Great Basin desert could ultimately be what destroys her.

During the Cold War, eastern Nevada and western Utah were the sites of above ground nuclear testing. Williams and her family lived in fall-out communities. When the wind blew, it blew radiation in their direction. The children there drank “contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated breasts of their mothers…”

For Williams and other women whose families have been plagued with disease—-Williams herself has lost seven loved ones to breast cancer—-the connection is clear. The poisoning of the desert and its communities is well documented. Their family history in the area is undisputed is as well. And it is that history, that sense of belonging, which inspires Williams to stay. Despite the heartache, the inherent dangers, she is at home. She is one with place.


Filed Under: Reviews and Musings |