Refiguring the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography

Chapter 1: Writing the Self through Others

Each of the thirty-six chapter titles of Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge focuses on a particular species of bird. A naturalist by profession, Williams fills her book with careful descriptions of the numerous avian species that flock to Great Salt Lake or the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge for resting or nesting. For example, in her chapter “White Pelicans”: Hundreds of white pelicans stand shoulder to shoulder on an asphalt spit that eventually disappears into Great Salt Lake. They do not look displaced as they engage in head-bobbing, bill-snapping, and panting; their large, orange gular sacs fanning back and forth act as a cooling device. Some preen. Some pump their wings. Others stand, take a few steps forward , tip their bodies down, and then slide into the water, popping up like corks. Their immaculate white forms with carrotlike bills render them surreal in a desert landscape. . . . The pelicans of Gunnison Island must make daily pilgrimages to freshwater sites to forage on carp or chub. Many pelican colonies fly by day and forage by night, to take advantage of desert thermals. The isolation of Gunnison Island offers protection to young pelicans, because there are no predators aside from heat and relentless gulls. (‒) We might call this kind of detailed, elegant writing her “naturalist” talk, grounded in science and Williams’s own observations. But because she sees and even interprets the human world in part through bird behaviors and relations, Williams juxtaposes such objective deWriting the Self through Others 1 upv.allister.000-000.cx2 8/9/01 2:10 PM Page 11 scriptions with a very different kind of writing in which the I supersedes the eye and invites reader interpretation. In her chapter “Whistling Swan,” Williams describes walking the shore of Great Salt Lake after a storm and finding a recently dead swan. Dreading the loss of her mother from cancer, feeling depressed personally and professionally by the enormous loss of Great Salt Lake bird populations, Williams prepares its body as if for burial, an event that, for readers of the book and presumably for Terry herself, anticipates her mother’s death. Williams untangles the long neck, straightens the wings, places two black stones over the eyes like coins, washes with her own saliva the swan’s black bill and feet until they shine— and then she lies down next to the body and imagines herself a swan: I have no idea of the amount of time that passed in the preparation of the swan. What I remember most is lying next to its body and imagining the great white bird in flight. I imagined the great heart that propelled the bird forward day after day, night after night. Imagined the deep breaths taken as it lifted from the arctic tundra, the camaraderie within the flock. I imagined the stars seen and recognized on clear autumn nights as they navigated south. Imagined their silhouettes passing in front of the full face of the harvest moon. And I imagined the shimmering Great Salt Lake calling the swans down like a mother, the suddenness of the storm, the anguish of its separation. And I tried to listen to the stillness of its body. At dusk, I left the swan like a crucifix on the sand. I did not look back. (‒) In this passage, the details about swan migrations from the Arctic tundra to Great Salt Lake are certainly accurate, but their significance, I would maintain, is not that Williams is trying to teach us anything or to share biological information, as when she writes about the white pelicans. Instead, she is demonstrating the particulars of her own imaginings. Infusing this passage is the tension between a pastoral nature (camaraderie in the flock, clear nights and navigational stars, the harvest moon, the welcoming breast of the lake as a mother) and what, suddenly, that pastoral nature can become or do—the way, in other words, the pastoral contains destruction and death. The first tension leads to a second, one that Williams points to powerfully but rather enigmatically when she says that she “left the swan like a crucifix on the sand” and then “did not look back.” What kind of religious moment is this for her? Does not looking back imply that she Refiguring the Map of Sorrow 12 upv.allister.000-000.cx2 8/9/01 2:10 PM Page 12 has gotten out of this encounter...