In 1988, a year after her mother died of cancer, Terry Tempest Williams told her father about a recurring dream she had. “I told my father that for years, as long  as I could remember, I saw this flash of light in the night in the desert—that this image had so permeated my being that I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas”(Refuge 282).

Her father’s response was that it was not a dream. It was something that had actually happened. She had literally seen that as a girl. While sitting on her mother’s lap in the car on a drive home to Salt Lake City, Utah from Riverside, California. As they drove north past Las Vegas:

“We pulled over and suddenly, rising from the desert floor, we saw it, clearly, this golden -stemmed cloud, the mushroom. The sky seemed to vibrate with an eerie pink glow. Within a few minutes, a light ash was raining on the car”(Refuge 283).

Her mother was also pregnant at the time.

Tempest Williams learns that above ground atomic testing in the Nevada desert was common from 1951-1962. Local residents were promised it was safe.

Turns out it wasn’t. And the toxic downwind killed many of the women in Tempest Williams’ family and some of the men.

In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991), the book for which she is most well-known, Tempest Williams brings this hidden reality into sharp focus by detailing the painful story of her mother’s long relationship with cancer. First, with breast cancer when she was thirty-eight and Tempest Williams was in her teens. Again, with its recurrence as ovarian cancer in 1983 from which she eventually died in 1987 when Tempest Williams was thirty-two.

By equating environmental issues and ecological crises with social justice, Refuge catapulted Tempest Williams to the forefront of the environmental movement, where she yet reigns supreme.

But that is only a part of the story of Refuge.

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Nothing is simple in a book by Terry Tempest Williams. Everything is infinitely complex and radically connected. If there is one thing that Tempest Williams teaches us, it is that. She does not deliver one word, one sentence, one reason, one theory solutions. She leads us through tangled webs from which none of us emerges clean of blame.

It is not only Tempest Williams’ mother whose death is detailed in Refuge. Her paternal Grandmother, “Mimi,” died from cancer as well in 1989.

At the same time, due to natural weather patterns, Great Salt Lake in Utah is being flooded and the birds are leaving or dying. The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge is devastated by the flood, as well as the heroic engineering measures taken to mitigate damage to the human-created world it is flooding.

“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”(3).

She begins to have dreams of women dancing around a fire. She begins to believe that once women were birds. In that articulation as birds, bird women, Priestesses of the Bird Goddess, women were empowered.

In When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, published in 2012, Tempest Williams reveals that when her mother was dying, she told Tempest Williams  she was leaving her journals to her, but not to read them until after she dies.

When Tempest Williams found the journals after her mother’s death, they were all empty.

Women and silence. Mothers and silence. Mothers and daughters. What is spoken. What is left unspoken. Empowerment. Disempowerment.

Diane Dixon Tempest was fifty-four when she died. Terry Tempest Williams was fifty-four when she wrote When Women Were Birds. She allows herself fifty-four ways to consider what she found when she opened the journals.

Diane Tempest Williams died on a full moon. At the end of chapter 1 of When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Willams writes:

“On the next full moon I found myself alone in the family home. I kept expecting Mother to appear. Her absence became her presence. It was the right time to read her journals. They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful clothbound books; some floral, some paisley, others in solid colors. The spines of each were perfectly aligned against the lip of the shelves. I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It, too, was empty, as was the fourth, the fifth, the sixth—shelf after shelf after shelf, all my mother’s journals were blank”(WWWB 2).

After that passage, in the printed version of When Women Were Birds, there are six blank, double-sided pages before the next chapter. Six blank pages in the beginning, one, one-sided blank page in chapter XLIX and four double-sided blank pages at the end of the book.

Silence.

Why do people remain silent?

They have nothing to say. What they have to say may hurt others. They are thinking and need time. They prefer not to speak. Inside, they feel quiet.

They are private. They have been silenced. They feel what they have to say is of no importance. They feel they are not educated enough on the subject. They are not given the chance to speak.  What they have to say may disrupt their life. Your silence speaks volumes.

Why do women remain silent? All of the above?

If you had blank pages to fill, would you fill them? With what? Would you want someone to read them after you die? What does it mean to want to be remembered for your silence?

Was it silence or reticence? Reticence is reluctance to speak, refusing to speak, being cautious, careful or avoidant. Is that the same as silence? Reticence has an active, deliberate quality to it. In that way, it seems different than silence. Reticence is saying no.

Between mother and daughter, Diane and Terry, there were silences. They had silences about the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormonism) in which both Terry Tempest Williams and her mother were raised. Silence around the subjugation of women in their faith that Terry struggles with, eventually leaving the church, and her Grandmother, Mimi, raged against. But her mother remained silent.

Mimi is brash and loud and wild in a way that Diane isn’t. That doesn’t mean Diane didn’t have opinions and feelings around it.

But she remained silent.

The Fremont people inhabited the Great Basin of Utah and the Colorado Plateau between 650-1350 C.E.  In Refuge, Tempest Williams describes the archeological digs she participated in with the museum she worked in at the time.

“I wonder how, among the Fremont, mothers and daughters shared their world. Did they walk side by side along the lake edge? What stories did they tell while weaving strips of bulrush into baskets? How did daughters bury their mothers and exercise their grief? What were the secret rituals of women? I feel certain they must have been tied to birds”(184).

In Refuge there are other small silences: generational silences that are present in most modern mother/daughter dyads. There, women often keep silent to keep the peace, knowing on many levels they actually cannot fully understand one another due to cultural, generational changes. Then there are the silences around illness, the caregiver begins to feel they ask too many questions, or hover too much. The silences of the one who is ill trying to shield loved ones.

The loud silences are the ones about cancer, why Diane is sick. The government that they trusted and believed in is killing them. At the time the book is written, in their home, the women cannot perform a healing prayer circle— only the men. Toxic chemicals are killing the birds. Essential wetlands and marshes, migratory routes and flyways of the birds are being covered with asphalt. They are descendants of white settlers living on the graves and land of people their ancestors killed.

Women have lost their power.

“The “still small voice” I was taught to listen to as a child was the “the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Today I choose to recognize this presence as holy intuition, the gift of the Mother. My prayers no longer bear the “proper” masculine salutation. I include both Father and Mother in Heaven. If we could introduce the Motherbody as a spiritual counterpoint to the Godhead, perhaps our inspiration and devotion would no longer be directed to the stars, but our words could return to the Earth”(Refuge 241).

The fragile vulnerability in human-to-human relationships and humans’ relationships to their ecosystems that are explored in both books hurt. Tempest Williams captures these in small moments of disbelief and acceptance. About her mother’s death, about her grandmothers’ deaths, about the nuclear test site causing it, about the Great Salt Lake and the birds. Yet there are also resilience and refuge. Life does persist.

“There is a chorus of wings navigating the planet. Twenty million shorebirds migrate through the United States each year to arctic breeding grounds in the spring and back to their wintering sites in South America. One bird may cover as many as fifteen thousand miles in a year.

Great Salt Lake is a refuge for these migrants. And there are certainly other strategic sites along the migratory path, essential to the health and well-being of those birds dependent upon wetlands. . . Without these places of refuge, successful migrations would cease for millions of birds”(Refuge 264).

When Women Were Birds is formatted like a journal. Along with the blank pages, it has a facing page with a box that says, This journal belongs to with blank lines under it to inscribe a name. The reader can fill them in or leave them blank.

Grandmother Mimi and birding

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated”(WWWB 225).

Tempest Williams’ writings are also spiritual tomes. The birds and nature are her religion. Her grandmother Mimi taught her about the birds, and birding.

“The days I loved most were the days at Bear River. The Bird Refuge was a sanctuary for my grandmother and me. I call her “Mimi.” We would walk along the road with binoculars around our necks and simply watch birds. Hundreds of birds. Birds so exotic to a desert child it forced the imagination to be still. The imagined was real at Bear River”(Refuge 15).

Reading the natural history of Great Salt Lake and the surrounding land in Refuge is educating and exhilarating. Almost every chapter is dedicated to a certain species of bird. Tempest Williams describes these birds as she watches them at Great Salt Lake, as she counts them, as she imagines their lives, as she observes their behaviors. She shares this with Mimi who has taught her how to do this.

She longs for the time when women were birds. When women were free. When women were empowered. She can feel it there underneath the overlays of what has come to be called patriarchy.

“I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My serenity surges in my solitude”(Refuge 29).

The silences change her. She will use her voice. She becomes an activist, environmentalist, writer. She works for social justice. She will honor the bird tribe.

“I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined. Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.”

We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have”(Refuge 92).

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of more than seventeen other books. Her newest book The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, will be published in March 2026.

Terry Tempest Williams is a Nasty Woman Writer and Activist.

©Theresa C. Dintino 2026

Works Cited

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Vintage Books, 1991

_________________. When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. Picador, N.Y. 2012