from Carolyn Jackson

A clerk in a Moab, Utah, bookstore suggested that I read something by Terry Tempest Williams after I exhausted its supply of Edward Abbey titles, and I’m glad she did. Born in 1955, Williams is a worthy successor to Abbey, who lived in the desert Southwest and died in 1989. A naturalist by education and vocation, Williams has the gift of seeing universality in the specific, whether she’s at the Great Salt Lake or in a Rwandan village. She is also a spiritual seeker—raised a fifth-generation Mormon, but a dissenter from some Latter Day Saints teachings. Where Abbey’s quest led to civil disobedience, Williams’s might lead to a hair-raising vision or a profound insight.

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Terry Tempest Williams
Pantheon, 1991, Out of Print. 320 pages, Available in Vintage Paperback, $13.95.

This is Williams’s masterpiece. She wrote it in a time of impending change: a rise in water level was destroying the wildlife sanctuary in the Great Salt Lake, where she studied migratory birds; her mother, Diane, developed ovarian cancer; and a developer had big plans for the neighborhood in Salt Lake City where she and her artist husband, Brooke, lived contentedly. I think the book’s strength comes from Williams’s discipline in moving between her deep mourning for what is being lost and her ability to focus on the exquisite beauty that is immediately before her—whether it’s a rare snow bunting, or a deep navy bathrobe with tiny stars that her mother buys. Her analogies come effortlessly. “After supper, we would spread out our sleeping bags in a circle, heads pointing to the center like a covey of quail, and watch the Great Basin sky fill with stars,” she recalls of family camping trips. “Our attachment to the land was our attachment to each other.”

Williams’s ancestors came to Utah pushing carts 150 years ago. She draws strength from this, but at the same time, there is a palpable tension between her independent spirit (she gives the finger to a bunch of yahoos who destroy a burrowing owl nest) and the patriarchal norms of the church. She is proudly feminist, having grown up with the example of strong women like her mother, who fought off breast cancer when her four children were young, and her grandmother Mimi, who took her on her first Audubon field trip when she was nine. Sadly, by the time the book ends, Williams is 34 years old and already the matriarch of her family. In a chapter called “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” we learn the meaning of the title’s reference to an unnatural history.

Leap
Terry Tempest Williams
Pantheon, 2000, Out of Print. 352 Pages, Available in Vintage Paperback, $16.95.

When we catch up with Williams almost a decade later, she and Brooke have moved to the Red Rock country of southeastern Utah. But this book is set in Madrid, where she has communed intermittently for seven years with Hieronymus Bosch’s painting El jardin de las delicias in the Prado museum. This triptych from the fifteenth century is referred to in English as The Garden of Earthly Delights, but as a girl, Williams was familiar only with the outer panels—Adam and Eve with Jesus in Paradise, and Hell on the other side. They were tacked to the wall over the bed where she slept in her grandparents’ home. Only as an adult did she discover the magnificent center panel. (A reproduction of the painting comes with the book.)

Williams moves fluidly from the Prado to Utah, in and out of her own psyche, and inside the painting as a contained world. She obviously knows her way around an art studio, but her naturalist’s eye finds 35 species of birds in The Garden.

There’s something else here: Williams is a religious mystic. In Refuge, she wrote, “I was raised to believe in a spirit world, that life exists before the earth and will continue to exist afterward, that each human being, bird and bulrush, along with all...