Frosh Summer Reading: For the Birds

By Alexander Rogers | Monday, October 4, 2004

Those meek, or heavily-intoxicated, pre-freshmen who never bothered to plunge into this year's literary offering from Dartmouth's First Year Office have missed out on the wealth of knowledge and understanding that lies within the foreboding heart of Terry Tempest William's Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Though it's reasonable to suspect that some might find its accompanying celluloid suggestion, The Day After Tomorrow, too taxing to warrant further introspection, I'm aghast, pained, maddened, &c. by the sheer volume of Refuge copies that remain unread on desks, bookshelves, or in gym bags.

Such cannot be the fate of this most brilliant work on the allegorical connection between breast cancer and rising water levels soon to grace your local thrift and consignment book store shelves. More bewildering, most eschewed the book in favor of watching the hunky Dennis Quaid and most prosperous urban centers receive their computer-generated dousing from an enraged mother earth, under the false assumption that one could stand in for the other. Simply because this environmental epic and a well-founded documentary are placed on the same list does not require they have anything in common except their mediocrity. There are obvious motifs that one witnesses in both, in addition to quirky environmentalist agenda, as in the appearance of dangerous liquids like water and bile. However, beneath the surface the novel is an entirely different creature just waiting to be loosed upon limber minds.

As we roam the toxic plains, naïve to the devastating effects of urban sprawl on our environment and our breasts, our hero Terry Williams invites her readers to become a part of her devastatingly beautiful life story. Her fondness for the myriad bird species inhabiting the marshes in the Great Salt Lake region is a lesson to all about the lengths people may go to make the mundane exciting, and the resilience with which they face their utter failure to do so. As the chapters wear on, the Salt Lake City area faces virtual annihilation as the Great Salt Lake ascends no less than a couple of inches.

With God's wrath unleashed upon the modern-day Sodom, Terry Williams must endure, as does the reader, the slow, very slow destruction of the bird habitat that was once the bedrock of her sanity. We count the untimely passing of each Snowy Egret as if it were the corpse of a dear relative. For every Wilson's Phalarope slain, tears are shed. As I passed the halfway point I was gripped by the need to fondle a bird corpse as a way of showing solidarity with nature, and it felt good knowing that I now had the knowledge to do it correctly from none other than Terry herself.

Aside from the fowl massacre is the author's mother, rife with cancer again. This bitter revelation is explained as the result of the fallout both author and mother were exposed to by wanton atomic bomb tests conducted somewhere in the Utah vicinity, and for some reason I completely buy that. This point onward the tale is concerned with the immense grief and quiet celebrations that accompany the end of a life. The reader, like a throw rug bugged by the KGB (it's hard not to embrace her disconnect from reality after page one-hundred), is given full access to the last conversations between a mother and her child and the child has spared us nothing. Take with you what you will from this scene in the chapter entitled Killdeer: "A Killdeer landed a few feet from where we were sitting. Kill-deer! Kill-deer! 'What bird is that,' Mother asked. 'A Killdeer,' Mimi answered." Indeed. And that was only one of the unforgettable moments that populate this masterwork.

It is from these sober experiences the author learns of the inevitability of change. She is helpless as both the bird sanctuary and her mother pass into memory. From the ashes of these cataclysms Terry Williams ceases to be the judgmental angry child of pages past and becomes a man. Her personal triumph is a victory for the activist stewing within each of our souls, and is a shoe-in for the next spot on the classics of the "women, nature, and grieving genre." At least that is what it said on the back of my copy.

Frosh Summer Reading: For the Birds

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