Walking in the Land of Many Gods: Remembering Sacred Reason in Contemporary Environmental Literature

CHAPTER FOUR: The Long Migration Home: Listening to Birds in Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

86 Chapter Four The Long Migration Home Listening to Birds in Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place As a work of ecological restoration and the reformation of self, Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood reinscribes the longleaf pine ecosystem into existence on a metaphorical or textual level. The restoration of the lost forest in turn creates a value system in the autobiographer such that she is able to rewrite her own childhood, insinuating a close intimacy with the natural world around her, including the vanishing longleaf pine forests. Telling the story of the forests and of the self provides a foundation for Ray’s identity, a way of being that allows the landscape to presence in its ownness and that reconnects her with the mysterious plenitude, the sacredness of Earth. In The Sunflower Forest, William Jordan explains that sacredness derives from two sources, from an “apprehension of the unity underlying the manifest diversity of creation” and from acts that violate this unity, acts such as hunting or the felling of forests. He suggests that the second type of access to the sacred is the basis for our “ecological engagement with the world,” for it recognizes a broader and more complex understanding of community, one that depends on an awareness of the necessary complications of engaging the other and the psychological difficulties that come with this transaction.1 Ray’s work moves through these complexities in order to develop a diverse The Long Migration Home 87 and resilient community around her, one that can, in turn, move beyond metaphorical restoration and physically restore the lost forests. Jordan concludes : “If environmentalism is to succeed at its central task of providing the basis for a healthy relationship between ourselves and the rest of nature, it must . . . confront the difficult, emotionally challenging aspects of such relationships.”2 Through the two intertwined narratives that comprise the work, Refuge : An Unnatural History of Family and Place also strives to broaden our understanding of community through developing an awareness of our mortality and the otherness that exists between ourselves and the rest of the world, including both humans and the land. According to Charles Mitchell, the stories of Williams’s mother’s cancer and of the rise of Great Salt Lake are “driven by a need to learn how to live with, and within, change: each searches for a metaphor that will allow one to remain rooted without being buried, broken, or swept away: How can we feel at home on a landscape that is always in flux? How do we belong to something—a family, a place— that refuses to stay put?”3 Specifically, in Refuge Williams must learn to evaluate the nature of the changes that confront her—the loss of her mother from cancer and the loss of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge from the rise of Great Salt Lake—and to reconfigure these changes within her understanding of the self and the sacred. In the process of unfolding the stories of her mother and the lake, the two narratives of the memoir become parallel constructions in a search for acceptance of change and loss. Cheryll Glotfelty charts the correspondence between the rise of the lake and the climaxes of the story’s plot; she notes that “with the skill of a fiction writer, Williams has arranged her factual material so that the highest lake levels correspond to turning points and personal transformations in the family narrative.”4 The connection between these narratives, the confluence between the rise of her mother’s cancer and the rise of Great Salt Lake, allows Williams to explore the histories of two simultaneous and seemingly unnatural events that reveal an interconnectedness of family and place and complicate her understanding of self and community. Although these two external events dominate the narrative, another narrative layer exists that provides a unifying thread in the stories of her mother ’s cancer and the rise of the lake. At the conclusion of her prologue, Williams suggests what her book is about: “Perhaps, I am telling this story in an attempt to heal myself, to confront what I do not know, to create a path for 88 Chapter Four myself with the idea that ‘memory is the only way home.’ . . . I have been in retreat. This story is my return” (4). As I have explored in chapter 3, the autobiographical act—the...