We spent the weekend camping, just the four of us. A long hike through the newly green forests of Vermont’s northern mountains. A 5-mile loop to the fire tower and back, led by the 10-year-old, who finally has the stamina to do this sort of thing. She hummed along the steep trail with her walking stick and darted up the rock ledges, encouraging the dog. We ate lunch at the crumbled remains of a Civilian Conservation Corps cabin, taking in the view, which was real, alive and true.

I like to think that this is the sort of freedom the fallen had intended to protect — the fresh air, the scenery, the time and access to move freely about this place we call home and absorb all its sensory pleasures. I like to think that my duty to the deceased is to cherish what we have, so I savored the sound of water tumbling over rock, the smell of honeysuckle and balsam, the squish of moss and mud beneath my feet. I looked out over the layered ridges in the distance, admired the variations of blue and green. I listened to the crack and hiss of the evening campfire, and enjoyed a conversation between owls on the cusp of night.

Later, when the camping was done and we’d returned to cell phone range, I learned that Brian Doyle had passed away. Taken from this life by a cancer of the brain, diagnosed just last Thanksgiving.

It is not lost on me, the timing of his final act. Brian was a man of wisdom, of deep humility and faith, his body of creative work a reflection of these traits (take, for instance, his essay, “Memorial Day”). It makes sense to me, somehow, that his exit from the earth occurred during a sanctioned time of remembrance, a time when we are reminded of our debts to those who came before us, when we question what, exactly, has been sacrificed so we might continue our quest for the American dream.

I think maybe Brian was a master of that pursuit, a master of finding happiness and other phenomena of the human condition within the folds of our pockets, in the everyday moments tucked between the recesses of our minds. Even in the wake of his diagnosis last fall, when the uncertainty of illness and pain loomed before him and his family, he requested of his friends and followers, simply: “Be tender and laugh.”

This has been hard. I have been sullen and short-tempered with friends, with family, with total strangers — I guess because lately, the state of our union has felt to me like a terminal diagnosis. I have descended into the rabbit hole of internet research, obsessing over best case and worst case scenarios, grieving candidly over the serious illness I feel is plaguing my country now — a “big honkin’ brain tumor,” as Brian Doyle called his own particular affliction.

Tumors of this sort work swiftly. Over the last six months, I have watched and protested as the powerful and greedy have begun to dismantle all the systems that were put into place to protect the historically oppressed and vulnerable among us. I have contacted my elected officials and marched for the integrity of science in policy while the Trump administration denies the realities of climate change and maneuvers to hoard and squander and pollute the land and water that we’re all supposed to share. It has been like witnessing a death — an intentional death, a dirty secret back room deal to divide the entire estate while those in charge hold a pillow over the gasping mouth of our democratic ideals.

Fuck this cancer. Fuck cancer fuck Trump fuck Pence fuck McConnell fuck Ryan fuck Sessions fuck Pruitt fuck Bannon fuck Tillerson fuck Kushner fuck Spicer and DeVoes.   I am sad, I am angry — so much that I am no longer making good on my pursuit of happiness.

Last weekend, my family and I wove through patches of purple and painted trillium in the forest surrounding Lake Elmore — a park that was gifted to the State of Vermont by local citizens in 1936. This was a dark period in our history, when Americans suffered under the Great Depression and Dorothea Lange snapped her iconic photograph, Migrant Mother, to expose the poverty and exploitation of migrant laborers, and Hitler’s dictatorship in Nazi Germany was metastasizing into a global concern. A period perhaps not so unlike the one we are facing now.

And yet, within periods of despair, there are glimmers of light. A community of readers come together to celebrate a departed writer’s gorgeous words. A group of local citizens donate a tract of land, so that 80 years later, a family might take a hike together in a forest and reaffirm their definition of joy.

Jesse Owens earned four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, disproving on a world stage Hitler’s unfounded theory of Aryan superiority. It was the very first televised Olympic Games; the world was literally watching. Remember that story? That beautiful black body exploding away from the line, pulling farther and farther away from the others in the race. A moment of human excellence, shining in an arena draped with hatred and aggression. Oh how it must have felt to be American on that day, to rise above that stain.

It must have been something else.

The post Memorial Day appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

The day is bright, cold spring. Wind gusts around the corners, flapping and twisting municipal door hangers into indecision. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth they dance. I lean in for a closer look:

Village of Hoosick Falls Water Users 

WATER UPDATE

Information about Temporary Filtration and Flushing: 2/25/16

It’s late March now, months after the news about contamination of the village’s water system with perfuorooctanoic acid (PFOA) went public. The likely culprit, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, a manufacturing facility that uses Teflon to make coated plastic film, tape, and insulated wiring — one of the few remaining companies that still employ people in this town.

This town, like so many other former mill towns in northern New England and upstate New York— a place of 19th and early 20th century prosperity, now faded into a shadow of its former self. You’ve been to a town like this, perhaps even lived in a town like this. Grass-filled, uneven sidewalks between old Victorian homes. The lovingly maintained, brick bungalow library sits around the corner from a house with a crumbling porch. Faded plastic toys accumulated in the yard. Buds emerge on the trees after a long and difficult winter. The sign in front of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church reads, Please pray for our town to get through this water crisis.

The Saint-Gobain facility peeks through the trees from the Little League fields on Waterworks Road, where parents, probably grateful for the work, may gather after their shifts to cheer on the batter poised over home plate. The fields are empty now, except for a father pitching balls to his son. He lifts his head and watches me pass by. I wonder if he’s the kind of dad who would lean against the chain-linked fence and brag about his tough Teflon kid.

This morning, before I left home, my children wanted to know where I was headed. “Hoosick Falls?” my daughter said, “Who’s sick? That’s funny.”  It is, until it isn’t.

Just like all the other towns that have lived through a water crisis, it was the amount of cancer that made people wonder. Michael Hickey, the Hoosick Falls resident whose inquiry set current events into motion, lost both his father and grandmother to kidney cancer. He worries about his son. The water in both of their homes contained concentrations of PFOA well above the initial 0.4 ppb threshold limit set forth by the EPA, and since that testing, the EPA has revised its recommended limit to 0.1 ppb. Meanwhile, public health officials in Vermont, in response to a similar water crisis in nearby North Bennington, have used the same toxicologic studies to justify a 0.02 ppb PFOA standard.

The sluggish, inconsistent response must sting, like a reported case of domestic abuse that won’t be believed. And this is a matter of violence — just ask any cancer survivor about what the body must endure. I can’t help but think: if this crisis had been an act of terror, if someone had knowingly added PFOA to a public water supply, it would have been considered an act of war.

Later, when I am standing in the foyer of the Hoosick Township Historical Society building, studying photos of the community’s fallen soldiers from the Second World War, I will remember that Teflon’s inaugural application was for the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb. I will remember that Teflon’s commercial utility was born from the science of intentional destruction, much like modern-day pesticides born from military nerve agents, and I will marvel at how intertwined the fingers of commerce and war have always been. I will mourn the dull, persistent echo of their intergenerational casualties.

But now, I wait outside the Armory on Church Street, where officials from the New York Departments of Health and Environmental Conservation stand behind tables with flyers containing information about how little we really know about the health effects of PFOA. A young woman walks by on the sidewalk, pushing a stroller with a little boy, maybe two or three years old. She doesn’t go inside. Is she worried about the water that is dwelling inside his cells? Is she worried about his future? Maybe they’ve already been inside to talk with the experts, given samples of their blood. Maybe she’s just looking ahead, soldiering on, accepting their new normal.

The building is beautiful inside — an old gymnasium with a mile-high ceiling and light brick walls, that appear to have been dressed up for a reception. I am impressed by the art, the optimism of this space. Brightly colored quilts line the front of the gym, and everywhere I turn are hand-painted owls with the slogan “Hoosick Rising” — a redevelopment-focused antonym to the downtrodden Hoosick Falls.

Across the room from the make-shift phlebotomy lab, where citizens may get their blood sampled for PFOA analysis, is a little wishing tree with positive messages from Hoosick Falls residents, about why they love their town. Here is where I find the soul of this place — neighbors expressing love and support for one another in the face of challenging times. You’ll never find a place with friendlier people, one postcard reads. Another card touts the value of the history of Hoosick Falls. The one that makes me pause: I ❤︎ HF because we have a great pool for kids to swim in. Love, Raegan.

When I meet the DEC officials, I tell them that years ago, I used to be an environmental regulator myself. They relax into a comradely stance. We exchange technical details on the contaminant of concern. Yes, PFOA appears to be very soluble in water.  No, they don’t yet know how quickly it’ll break through the activated carbon filters — they will be monitoring them frequently, and there’s a feasibility study being conducted to identify alternative sources of drinking water for the area. No, they don’t believe there are any break-down products, but they’ve heard that several different perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) can degrade into PFOA. They are just now learning about these chemicals, which industries use them, how they behave when they’re released. There are probably multiple sites — Teflon-related manufacturing was the industry du jour. The agency is doing the best it can with the resources that it has.

I can feel the tension against resignation to the absurdity of the situation, how difficult it will be to get their horse to catch up with this runaway cart. It’s really a failure of the Toxic Substances Control Act, we all agree. Teflon has been in commercial use since the 1940s, its toxicologic profile held in secret by DuPont from early as the 1960s, and even now, ten years past an historic $10.25 million settlement between the EPA and DuPont, concerning DuPont’s failure to report the risk of harm that PFOA presents to human health and the environment — even now, the EPA lacks sufficient data to confidently adopt appropriate exposure standards for this ubiquitous synthetic compound.

One DEC official shares with me that earlier in the week, he received a request from the Commissioner’s Office, probably for the purpose of briefing a politician in the wake of this water crisis: “They said, ‘Please identify any public water systems in New York that are at risk of becoming polluted by any regulated and/or unregulated contaminants.’” He looks at me, shaking his head. All of them.

The woman from the Department of Health informs me that about 2,500 of the town’s 3,500 residents have requested to have their blood tested for PFOA. I ask her if there is a certain threshold concentration of PFOA in blood, above which residents will be referred for more rigorous medical monitoring. “We aren’t yet sure what the long-term plan for bio-monitoring will be,” she admits. “I guess it depends on what we find.”

But she doesn’t know what they will find. No one does. They can only guess, based upon the epidemiological studies and exposure data they have gathered from previous PFOA contamination cases in Ohio, West Virginia, and New Jersey.  I leave the Armory a little shaken by the sense of bearing witness to another accidental experiment.

On my way out the door, I notice a poster for the Hoosick Has Heart community blood drive. Donate blood. Save a life. Monday, April 11, at the Hoosick Falls Community Alliance Church.  The bright cold and piercing wind send shivers down my spine. I hope they get their sample results before then.

The post A Walk in Hoosick Falls appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

But no matter how savvy I think I am about the science, or how much people like me tend to believe that science is what’s going to save us, there is but one essential discipline whose role is really the driver of this bus.

Remember that phrase coined by political strategist James Carville in the 1990s? “It’s the economy, stupid.” Well, I can’t seem to get that phrase out of my head… again. And while Carville’s point back then may have been to emphasize the importance of the struggling economy in the 1992 presidential election, my point in resurrecting the phrase is this: It doesn’t matter how the science explains the cause-and-effect relationships involved in an environmental health crisis. What really matters is the why it happened — which, unsurprisingly, is almost always a matter of economics.

Take Flint, MI, for instance. Sure, I understand the science behind what’s happened:  Water drawn from the Flint River and delivered to Flint’s municipal water customers from spring of 2014 on was more corrosive than the City of Detroit water they had been using prior to then, so the new water literally ate through their aging infrastructure, causing lead and other particulates to pour from their taps. Chemistry 101, right?

But the science doesn’t explain how Flint River water got into the pipes in the first place, nor does it explain why months passed without any corrective action, despite complaints from residents about the visible contamination of their drinking water. Science also fails to provide an acceptable explanation for why Flint pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha was belittled and attacked when she released her findings that the percentage of Flint children with abnormally high blood lead levels had doubled since the City switched its water supply. Or why it wasn’t until late December and early January that authorities declared the continued lead poisoning of Flint’s children as the emergency that it was.

More than a year of daily, chronic exposure to lead-contaminated water has occurred in hundreds of Flint households — in a predominately African American community where over 40% of the population lives below the poverty level. Science? No, I think another discipline might be at play. You can almost see the words in the thought bubbles hanging above the City and State officials’ heads: It’s just for a few more months. Really, what difference does it make?

There’s an important term that is often tossed around in civil discourse about economics: “moral hazard.”  Moral hazard refers to the elevated risks one party might take in an economic transaction because another party will bear the negative consequences of those risks. We heard a lot about moral hazard around the Wall Street bank bailouts in 2008, and we often hear conservative grumbling about the moral hazards of the Affordable Care Act —or any social service program, for that matter— and how it isn’t fair for the taxpayers to pay for someone else’s (potentially irresponsible) personal choices.

But the concept of moral hazard is seldom discussed around matters of environmental or personal harm, when the asymmetry of risk involves something other than cold hard cash. Which seems misguided, since the underlying presence of unfairness is the same. Think about it: What if the moral hazard threatens one party’s ability to breathe? The ability to drink clean water? The ability to go to school or play in a city park without getting shot? Where are the conservatives then?

I don’t present this idea as a theoretical argument, because unabated moral hazards are yielding environmental and human health tragedies as we speak. Consider for a moment the economic equation controlling gun regulation in this country.

Consider the matter of DuPont in Parkersburg, WV, where, for decades, the company dumped thousands of tons of perfluorooctanioc acid waste (PFOA, formerly known as C8, the main ingredient in Teflon) into the Ohio River, unlined ponds and beyond, causing widespread contamination of surface and drinking water resources in Parkersburg and surrounding communities. DuPont not only exposed thousands of people to a toxic chemical, they actively concealed the known health effects of PFOA (identified in their own internal toxicology studies) for decades, so they could continue to bring in over $1 billion per year in profit from their highly successful Teflon products (read the recent New York Times article about the case here, a Huffington Post article about it here, and a slightly older one from The Intercept here).

DuPont had even developed a different chemical to replace PFOA in the early 1990s—one that was reportedly less persistent in the environment and stayed in the body for a shorter duration of time— but the company ultimately decided against replacement because the economic risk was too great.  Of course, when the exposure imposed upon workers of DuPont and the 70,000 people served by PFOA-tainted drinking water systems is factored into the equation, along with the link between PFOA and birth defects, kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, and other serious ailments, one wonders where the asymmetry of risk really falls.

—Which brings me back to my point: This is an economic equation, a deeply unbalanced one that is designed to limit the loss of profits, the loss of dollars and cents. Until we start attaching appropriate value to the lives at stake in these institutional transactions, I’m afraid the science is never going to be able to catch up to our inevitable loss.

Photo credits:

npr.org

dispatch.com, Chris Russell, Dispatch file photo

The post Moral Hazard: It’s More than Economics, Stupid appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I, for one, feel relief.

At first, it didn’t bother me — the pinking of October, that is.  I have nothing against legitimate cancer awareness campaigns.  No ill-will toward the empowerment of those who have faced a diagnosis.  In fact, I think it’s important to call attention to the things that can bring us down, to the interventions that can help save lives.  I, too, have pledged money toward Race for the Cure, even purchased pink things in the wake of a friend’s mother’s diagnosis, in my clumsy attempt to make a difference.  Why not?  It was an easy thing to do.

And I though it embarrasses me to admit, I justified my passive support with the self-assurance that I was fostering camaraderie around the cause — funding team spirit for “a league of their own” — so that attention would be called to the sheer number of women facing cancer, and would motivate some change.  But with each passing year, the most noticeable change is the not the scientific promise of finding the cause or the cure, but rather the pervasiveness of the Susan G. Komen brand.  There’s a lot of pink, a lot of money, and still, a lot of people fighting cancer.

I know that for the recently diagnosed, there is comfort in numbers, comfort in knowing you’re not alone.  But as a society, we should be unsettled by these numbers.  We should be bothered by the way the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s breast cancer awareness campaign has begun to look more like Cancer Pride.  Cancer isn’t a difference to be celebrated and accepted. It’s still an awful disease.  (For more on the commercialization of breast cancer, see the documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc., based on the work of Breast Cancer Action and the late breast cancer activist, Barbara Brenner.)

But the pinking of October seems to have distracted us from this fact.  Instead, Pink-tober assures me that there will be pink M&Ms just in time for my daughter’s birthdays, and reminds me with cute little Facebook posts that I should “feel my boobies” to “care for my pair” — underscored with Pinterest pictures of adorable Mammo-Graham treats.

Pink-tober adorns NFL players with pink cleats and football gloves (an ironic act of support from an organization historically blind to violence against women), and celebrates the use of pink drill bits to frack for natural gas (courtesy of the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s partnership with Baker Hughes, whose jaunty ad boasts “doing our bit for the cure.” Get it? Never mind that fracking threatens air and drinking water with carcinogenic chemicals).  

In short, Pink-tober has taken a serious health condition — sometimes a matter of life and death — and reduced it to the parody of a South Park episode, or the whimsy of a tampon ad.  But what concerns me the most — beyond the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s misguided decision to hitch its moneymaking awareness campaign to outrageously inappropriate partners — beyond the hypocrisy of this brazen pinkwashing, it’s the normalization/celebration of cancer that has me so upset.

Why?  Because it suggests that we’ve given up on cancer prevention.  Invites us to accept its inevitability.

Last year I turned 40, which means that I was advised by my doctor to begin getting regular mammograms, to submit to the annual mashing of my girls.  A milestone for my breasts.

I remember their first milestone.  I was in the 5th grade, just budding.  Planning with my friends in hushed whispers during lunch — choosing which day we would all wear our training bras, which day we would practice being women.  We had already read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret to introduce us to our fate.  A few years later, we huddled together in a friend’s basement, exchanging notes on who among us had gotten their periods.  Those who had reached the milestone answered questions for those of us who hadn’t.

I thought of those moments again this year — those moments when I watched others reach their landmarks so I would know what to do when I finally reached mine.  Judy Blume herself was diagnosed with cancer in 2012.  Another friend of mine was diagnosed last month.  And I realize now that I am one of a only few in my close circle of friends who hasn’t been diagnosed.  We are only in our forties.

It feels like that time in the basement, when my friends and I all sat in a circle sharing notes about what’s to come — like a scene from a Judy Blume novel.  Almost everyone has a story to share — except for me, because I haven’t gotten my cancer yet.

Take note: This isn’t the hope that is being advertised.  Please, think before you pink.  Reject the normalization of cancer, and the conflicts of interest in cancer campaigns.  Support cancer organizations that prioritize cancer prevention as high as their fundraising for “awareness.”  Remember, detection does not equal prevention.  They are NOT one in the same.   

Photo credits:

Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret Book Cover from www.amazon.com

Feel Your Boobies image from www.owningpink.com

Mammo-Graham images from simplethrift.wordpress.com

The post When Did Cancer Become a Judy Blume Novel? appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Mary Heather Noble is the winner of the $10,000 first-place prize for Creative Nonfiction’s The Human Face of Sustainability essay contest, sponsored by Arizona State University’s Sustainability Solutions Festival.

Mary Heather Noble’s prize-winning essay, “Acts of Courage,” uses a series of flashbacks from her youth and early scientific career to recall how cancer from contaminants intersected her life, unflinchingly using devastating statistics to show how carcinogens have so easily entered into daily life.

Noble will be honored at the Sustainability Solutions Festival in Tempe, AZ, February 17-22.  The festival is a program within the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

“The idea of sustainability can mean many things to different people, but it is clear through Mary Heather Noble’s brilliant essay, as well as by each of our other finalists, that there is a deep, human connection to sustainability, regardless of definition,” said Patricia Reiter, director of the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives.

Read the full announcement at creativenonfiction.org and asunews.asu.edu.

The post $10,000 Sustainability Essay Prize Awarded appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I recently finished reading Kristen Iversen’s book, Full Body Burden, and —even as a person familiar with the toxic secrets of government and industry— found the details of the Rocky Flats environmental legacy to be shocking.  Shocking, perhaps, because Iversen’s details are delivered so personally: her seemingly perfect hometown with room for children and horses to run and explore tainted by the invisible emissions of a secret nuclear weapons plant, rumors of covered-up contamination, and the cancer clusters to fuel them.  Woven into Iversen’s account of Rocky Flats is her own parallel tale of family erosion from her father’s alcoholism, shrouded in the stoicism of the family’s Norwegian heritage.  The dual narratives are powerful, delivering with unrelenting honesty the anxiety of knowing something deeply unsettling about your home, yet lacking the will or means to leave.

I do not personally know Kristen Iversen, but years ago, I worked with her sister, Karma, at the New Mexico Environment Department.  Our department was responsible for issuing wastewater discharge permits for all types of facilities: municipal wastewater treatment plants, dairies and food processing facilities, mining operations and other industrial facilities, including, among others, Los Alamos National Labs (LANL).

Neither Karma nor I oversaw any permits for LANL — she was a soil scientist who specialized in agricultural wastewater permits, and I was fresh out of graduate school, just getting my feet wet with permitting municipal and small-scale industrial wastewater discharges.  But I can recall the frustration of our more-senior colleagues who did manage permits for the Federal facilities, the secrecy shrouding activities at LANL and Sandia National Labs.  And I can remember talking with Karma about the rumors that floated around those sites: elevated rates of thyroid cancers, stories about dogs developing cancerous growths on their paws from their frolics in the adjacent canyons.

As a new State government employee, I was careful not to be blindly swayed by the hysteria of misguided risk perception.  There were always people with “too much time on their hands,” quick to bundle anecdotal tidbits with partial information to formulate wildly speculative conclusions about the dangers of site X or the devious intentions of company Y.  But after a few years of seasoning and a broadened portfolio of sites, I began to understand the paranoia.  I can recall thinking of more than a few of my sites that I could never live near there.  I could never live with the anxiety.  You know what they say about the restaurant business — once you know what goes on in the kitchen, you’ll be reluctant to eat out again.

My foray into the history of Rocky Flats via Iversen’s Full Body Burden prompted me to revisit Ellen Meloy’s The Last Cheater’s Waltz and her anxiety of place.In The Last Cheater’s Waltz, Meloy is wrought with the guilt and paranoia of inhabiting and loving a place as beautiful as the redrock canyon country of southeastern Utah, and knowing its role in the widespread violence of nuclear weapons development and testing in the American Southwest.  Like a betrayed lover, Meloy traces the path of uranium mined from her Moab-area home to the weapons development facility in Los Alamos and the Trinity nuclear weapons test site in New Mexico, seeking some kind of — what?  Understanding? Redemption for choosing to live there despite its tainted past?

Meloy’s journey is an attempted exorcism of the anxiety of place — a theme most intriguing to those of us with academic inclinations, but imagine what that must feel like in the first person.  Imagine what it feels like to live in a place, or be from somewhere where you have a high probability of developing some condition, some malaise, just because you call that place home.  Love Canal.  Rocky Flats.  Fukashima.  Or imagine what it must be like to love a landscape with a hidden history as as cursed with death as  Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These are no ordinary betrayals.  To most of us, these are abstract places, places to consider in the large-scale debate about environmental degradation.  But to some of us, these places are home.

The post The Anxiety of Place appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Williams’ account is carefully braided, the rise of the Great Salt Lake and its threat to the bird refuge skillfully juxtaposed against the rise of a deadly cancerous tumor in her mother’s abdomen.  With each rising lake interval, Williams parallels her mother’s peril with that of every species threatened by the flood.  This metaphor is carried throughout the book, as she weaves fragmented strands of the two narratives together to contemplate natural cycles, the inevitability of death, and the unnatural systems our culture employs to prevent them both.  We experience first hand the anxiety and heartbreak of every threatened bird, every stage of her mother’s disease, and are left with the intimate knowledge of mourning the loss of wildlife and place intertwined with the loss of one’s mother.  Williams’ emotional journey illustrates both our reluctance to accept even the most natural of changes, and the lengths to which we go to resist them.

Refuge is a lyric work, a contemporary form published nearly a decade before the lyric essay’s widespread recognition.  And perhaps that’s what made it so successful — it was prose poetry before its time, structured in a way that enabled history, biology, and geography to enhance a personal narrative.  This literary craft blog post explores how Williams skillfully transitions from one story strand to another, using white space, common words, images, and ideas as points of contact for effectively weaving one section into another.

Williams introduces the metaphor between the flooding of the bird refuge and her mother’s death from cancer in the Prologue of the book:

Most of the women in my family are dead.  Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family.  The losses I encountered at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as Great Salt Lake was rising helped me to face the losses within my family.  When most people had given up on the Refuge, saying the birds were gone, I was drawn further into its essence.  In the same way that when someone is dying many retreat, I chose to stay. (p. 4)

The early establishment of this metaphor provides the well from which Williams will draw to nourish the connective tissue binding her scientific and observation-based sections on the bird refuge and the Great Salt Lake with her more candid personal reflections on family, illness, and death.  For instance, in her second chapter, after having introduced the reader to the Great Salt Lake and the connection that she and the lake have to the refuge, Williams is able to seamlessly transition into the discovery of her mother’s illness:

… The long-legged birds with their eyes focused down transform a seemingly sterile world into a fecund one.  It is here in the marshes that I seal my relationship to Great Salt Lake.

I could never have anticipated its rise.

My mother was aware of a rise on the left side of her abdomen.  I was deep in dream.  This particular episode found me hiding beneath my grandmother’s bed as eight black helicopters flew toward the house.  I knew we were in danger. (p. 22)

Here, Williams employs white space and the word rise as the thread that connects these two fragments together — fragments that might otherwise seem disjointed, were it not for her prior establishment of the symbolic relationship between the two.

Williams uses the same technique later in the book to transition from her personal narrative to a section that discusses the history of Mormon religion and its connection to the land.  In this instance, Williams describes a scene in which her family learns that surgery and chemotherapy have failed to eliminate cancer from her mother’s body.  Her mother, originally opposed to undergoing treatment, unleashes anger at Williams and Williams’ father, saying, “I could have handled this, why couldn’t you?”  Williams is heartbroken, crippled with guilt:

… We had wanted a cure for Mother for ourselves, so we could get one with our lives.  What we had forgotten was that she was living hers.

I fled for Bear River, for the birds, wishing someone would rescue me.

The California gulls rescued the Mormons in 1848 from losing their crops to crickets.  The gull has become folklore.  It is a story we know well… (p. 68-9)

Again, the insertion of a little white space, coupled with the use of a common word between the sections (in this case, rescue), enables Williams to gently pivot from an emotionally charged family scene to a relevant historical anecdote about one of the refuge’s resident birds.  The effect is not only an effective transition from one narrative to another; it is a mechanism for the slowing of pace, and the relief of tension in the prose itself.

Williams utilizes white space well in Refuge, the vacancy of words allowing the reader to draw the connections between her fragments for him or herself.  We recognize it as a pattern, the more difficult the circumstances become, the more white space we see.  Toward the middle and end of the book, as the stakes for the refuge rise, along with the tension in her family, Williams’ prose become more fragmented.  The white space increases, and the connective tissue between sections is grounded in images and ideas:

Mother.  She is preoccupied.  Yesterday, on the telephone, she said she didn’t think she could make the family backpacking trip in the Tetons scheduled for summer.

“I think I may have pulled some muscles in my stomach,” she said.

I want to believe her.

It rains and rains.  Great Salt Lake continues to rise.

Eudora Welty, when asked what causes she would support, replied, “Peace, education, conservation, and quiet.”

Mother, Mimi and Jack, and I are seeking quiet in St. George, Utah. (p. 133-4)

As disjointed as these fragments seem, the reader easily follows the prose.  The white spaces, the symbolic rain and rising lake, the need for quiet all paint a larger picture: Williams’ mother is dying, and there is nothing that they can do.  The conclusion, though not spelled out, is easily understood.

In Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams has masterfully illustrated the potential of the fragmented approach, the importance of finessing transitions, and the beauty of lyric prose.  Her use of white space, common words between sections, and relevant images are an effective mechanism for manipulating pace, conveying emotion, relieving tension, and solidifying theme in the body of her prose.

The post Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: A Lesson in Braided Form appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.