Owls vs. Cancer

Terry Tempest Williams, an American author, conservationist, and activist, draws inspiration for her writing from her homeland of Utah and her Mormon culture.  Her memoir, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, draws parallels between the flooding of the Great Salt Lake and the devastation at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, to her journey through the ravaging effects of breast cancer on her family and her relationship with the environment.    

Refuge begins with a background about the burrowing owls at the Bird Refuge.  While visiting the Bird Refuge with a friend, Terry is confronted with the realization that developers have completely leveled the mounds the burrowing owls lived in.  Three men tell her that the owls were messy and basically a nuisance.  Terry reacted in the following way: “Restraint is the steel partition between a rational mind and a violent one.  I knew rage.  It was fire in my stomach with no place to go” (Williams 12).  Obviously distraught over the loss of the owls, Terry responds by giving the three men the middle finger, a gesture her mother was appalled by, as women did not deliver obscene gestures to men.  Later in the book, she describes that “in Mormon culture, authority is respected, obedience is revered, and independent thinking is not” (Williams 285).  In following the traditions of her culture, she should have stayed silent about the owls, rather than “making a scene.”  It is understandable that the destruction of the owls’ habitat would enrage Terry, as the Bird Refuge had always remained a constant for her, something she could depend on.

It is interesting that Terry becomes enraged over the owls, but does not react in the same way when told the news of the tumor her mother discovered.  When her mother explains that she thinks she found another tumor, Terry does not get angry, she appears to be more in a state of disbelief.  Perhaps she believes that because her mother survived cancer once, that she can overcome it again and fight it.  She certainly becomes visibly upset, “the tears I had wanted to remain hidden splashed down on the notes I was taking, blurring the ink,” but she does not become angry over her mother’s diagnosis (Williams 27).  Terry’s mother comes to terms with the fact that she will not live much longer, and by spending time with and caring for her mother over the course of the book, Terry comes to terms with her mother’s death.

I am wondering why Terry exhibits such anger over the destruction of the owls, but does not react in the same way when told that her mother has cancer once again.  What are your thoughts on this?

Works Cited

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.