In Tempest Williams country: The Bryce Canyon I beheld in June.
When I hiked through the spectacular desert landscapes of Utah last year, I can remember where I was for so many things. That when the sun rose on my trip’s second day, I was standing on an observation point at Bryce Canyon – absorbing the way the ghostly hoodoo towers materialized from grey shadows into their sandy orange of their daytime selves. I remember that the very next morning, I was working my way along a narrow ledge path, fighting my fear of heights long enough to see the Delicate Arch up close and person, then working my way back down, back to the stone wall. Then there was the third day, the white-water rafting down the Colorado River, reddish cliffs rising in the distance in almost every direction.
But I don’t remember where, or when, it was that I picked up Terry Tempest Williams and took her along for the ride. I reckon it was some National Park gift shop or the other, either at Zion or Bryce, Arches or Canyonlands. Anyway, somehow, someway, I grabbed An Unspoken Hunger, the fine essay collection that, since I was too busy enjoying Utah through direct experience, I wound up saving for another grey winter in congested Worcester, Massachusetts, clear across the country from the sweepingly open homeland that the author invokes so vividly, I feel like I’m there instead.
I reveled in what I read. Tempest Williams writes of nature with a hypnotic blend of lyricism and practicality, writing about the people of the West – including Abbey and Georgia O’Keefe – with almost as much vividness as she does nature herself. There’s meditativeness and there’s mirth, reverence and irreverence. There is a haunting weaving of mythology – sometimes Native American, sometimes Greek – that suggests a visionary imagination. A biologist by training, she clearly knows her natural science, but her soul feels more like that of a poet.
But I write about Terry Tempest Williams here – in a blog focused on community service and related issues – for still another reason. Even as Dave Eggers – the writer I featured in my last blog – turned to helping start an imaginative tutoring center in San Francisco, Terry Tempest Williams has turned both her words and actions to social issues. Some causes, of course, are painfully personal. Her 1991 memoir – Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place – included the essay “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” exploring the possibility that the high incidence of cancer in her family is the result of living downwind from nuclear weapon tests in Utah. But she’s journeyed east to D.C. at different times to protest in public and to testify before Congress itself, and – journeying even farther from home – worked as an artist in war-torn Rwanda.
No matter how deep one’s convictions run, the life of the activist and advocate requires spiritual renewal. As Tempest Williams herself puts it, “Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” If you feel in such a reminder these days, turn to the beauty of nature, and wildness, and art, that I just discovered in An Unspoken Hunger.
Terry Tempest Williams in the land she loves. (Photo: Cheryl Himmelstein.)
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