Refuge - Terry Tempest Williams

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of
cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening
the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come
to gauge her life by.
One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product
of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout
of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and
accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual
grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.