January/February 1995
Utne Reader
This eloquent Mormon wife and mother writes meditations that
follow wilderness trails into the realm of memory and family,
exploring gender and community through the prism of landscape.
Refuge tells the story of her mother's losing battle with
cancer against the backdrop of a dangerous rise in the level of the
Great Salt Lake; her latest book, An Unspoken Hunger,
contains a collection of portraits of other women who have what
Williams calls a 'wild heart.' Williams' capacious and poetic
environmentalism includes the wide-open spaces of the heart.
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'I don't perceive myself as a writer,' says Terry Tempest
Williams, 40, the author of seven books. 'But I have always cared
about language and landscape--and story bridges those worlds.'
Williams' eloquent stories of her native place, northern Utah,
are also bridges from memory to family to the flash of a vireo's
wing. They are impassioned manifestos of a deep ecology that sounds
the depths of the human heart. In Refuge (1991) she tells
parallel stories: her mother's battle with a malignant tumor that
was almost surely caused by A-bomb test fallout, and the
encroachment of the flooding Great Salt Lake upon Williams' beloved
Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge.
'That book really asks the question: How do you find refuge in
change?' she says. For Williams the answer has everything to do
with the true meaning of wildness. 'It's frightening to embrace
change and paradox. But living with paradox means living with a
wild heart, and that means finding a certain comfort in the
contradictory nature of things. When I'm out in the natural world,'
she says, 'I can be fierce and compassionate at once, loving the
grizzly and the elk and watching the grizzly take the elk calf
down.'