“Sanderlings”–“Snowy Plovers” Summary and Analysis
“Sanderlings” Summary
Diane asks Terry if there is a chance she will live and is relieved when Williams says no. Diane’s morphine pump allows her to relax, but the family is still tense. Williams reflects on how beautiful her mother’s hands still are and all they have accomplished. Lying next to Diane, Williams feels at peace. She grows so accustomed to silence that she cannot come up with anything to say when Diane asks her to talk.
On January 15th, Williams begins to fear Diane’s death, and Diane talks to someone she sees in the room. Williams breaks down and begs for life instead of death; she decides to confess her feelings to her mother, though she is not sure Diane can hear her. She feels Diane stroking her head.
In the evening, the doctor comes by and says Diane’s death is near, and John orders everyone out of the house. Williams is enraged but resigns herself to never seeing her mother alive again. The next morning, however, John calls and asks the children to come back. He apologizes to the family and says he needs them to be there; he can’t endure Diane’s death alone. Williams is struck by the physical change in her mother. The family takes turns rubbing her cold legs and holding her hands as she gently fades.
Williams believes Diane is waiting for sunset, so she describes the beautiful scene. It begins to seem Diane will live longer, as her breathing and color improve. When the others leave the room, Williams locks eyes with Diane and observes that her mother is turning inward. She begins a breathing exercise with her mother that unites them, as Williams encourages Diane to let go. Williams feels immense love and calm in the last moments of her mother’s life. As John comes back to the room, Diane smiles and takes her last breath.
“Birds-of-Paradise”
Williams releases pieces of her mother’s hair into the trees so birds can use it for nesting. She considers Mormon burial traditions, which conflict with mortuary practices. When the mortician shows her Diane’s body, Williams is appalled by the makeup on her mother’s face. She asks him to remove it, but he will not, so Williams wipes the makeup off herself. However, when the family sees her on the day of the funeral, the makeup has returned because “she did not pass [the funeral home’s] inspection” without it. Williams wipes off the makeup again before the casket is closed and mourners offer condolences.
On Diane’s birthday, Williams leaves a bird-of-paradise on her grave and visits a cave that is considered a “holy place.” She drinks from the spring, admires the murals on the cave walls, and feels refreshed. The men “have migrated south” for work, and Williams longs for her “fractured and displaced” relatives.
“Pintails, Mallards, and Teals”
In April, lake levels reach another high, and the birds have gone; Williams feels disoriented and hopeless. The General Council, a large gathering of Mormons, takes place, but Williams does not attend. Instead she goes to the lake and covers herself with sand. Others deem this territory an “empty space”; the army, for example, sees the desert as a testing spot for biological weapons.
On a hike, Williams falls and hits her head, resulting in a major scar. She consults a plastic surgeon and is able to view her cut for the first time—it extends from her widow’s peak to her jaw, down her entire face.
Mimi has surgery for cancer in the same hospital where Williams spent so much time with Diane. Mimi does not want...
(This entire section contains 1400 words.)
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John and Williams to endure any more suffering and advises Williams to consciously let go of orthodoxy. Williams finds the comment odd because her grandmother has so clearly invested her time in studying alternative spiritualities.
The governor announces that the pumps have controlled the lake, and a public affairs officer talks about the spectacle created for tours of the pumping facility. Williams acknowledges the economic impacts the flooding has had on railroads and mines. When she sees the pumps herself, she asks how much they cost and how long they will be needed. Later, she encounters a dead rattlesnake in the desert whose rattles and head have been removed, and she relates that her male relatives stopped hunting after Diane’s death.
“Bitterns”
Williams visits a wildlife refuge in Oregon and finds many birds; she has a sense of homecoming. The birds’ ability to move on makes Williams feel she can do the same.
“Snowy Plovers”
Williams notes with irony that on the day the pumping station opens, the lake begins to recede by itself. The land under the flooding looks ill, and the Air Force is building a “bomb catcher” in the desert to capture unexploded bombs.
Meanwhile, snowy plovers in the West have declined fifty percent between the 1960s and 1980s due to loss of habitat. Because the National Audubon Society wants to list the species as threatened, Williams and another biologist complete a counting mission where they locate only six total plovers. The exposure and heat take a toll, and Williams feels delirious as she drives away from the desert.
The Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network wants to name Great Salt Lake a key site for migration and breeding. This identification as part of the network would bring attention and assistance to conservation projects in the lake area. Great Salt Lake is paired with an Argentine lake, and Williams imagines the birds flying between the two reserves.
While conservation efforts gain traction, the Lake Wasatch Coalition wants to create more dikes to control salt and freshwater stocks. This could also result in increased development along the lake and on Antelope Island.
Analysis
In this section, Williams invests Diane’s death with spiritual meaning and distances herself from the Mormon Church. The family sees their care for Diane as a sacred duty and cherishes the rituals of tending their mother. After Diane’s death, Williams feels she has helped her pass on, comparing her role to midwife at a birth. When the family prays over Diane’s body, Williams calls them “a flock of sanderlings wheeling over the waves of grief.” This metaphor reiterates the perceived link between Williams’s family and nature, namely birds. On the weekend of the General Council, Terry chooses to go to the lake, which she calls “a spiritual magnet that will not let me go.” She admits, “Dogma doesn’t hold me. Wildness does.” She worships in her own way by immersing herself in the landscape.
In a further questioning of her faith, Terry wonders at the exclusion of women from the Holy Trinity. She has always envisioned the Holy Ghost as female and believes religion needs a balance of masculine and feminine forces, as well as a proper connection with the land that can result from acknowledgment of the female. Due to her repeated connections between women and the earth, Williams implies that in distancing itself from the female, Mormonism also risks distancing itself from nature.
Williams, on the other hand, communes deeply with nature. When she hits her head on a hike and gains a scar down her entire face, she says she has “been marked by the desert.” She reflects on how people can both become part of a landscape and be shaped by it. Mimi tells Williams that scars are a sign of transformation, and Williams certainly undergoes a spiritual transformation as a result of Diane’s illness and death. When she comes across the rattlesnake whose rattles and head have been removed, she puts the snake around her neck and walks into the desert. Williams begins to understand that her grief is wider than she realized; she is mourning losses to the earth as well. Williams also talks to Lynne about the frequency of cancer in their family, and later, she looks at the empty eggshells in the museum and feels something is wrong. When she asks Mimi what eggs mean, Mimi links them to fertility. Williams thus connects “hollow eggs” to “hollow wombs” and concludes that neither humanity nor the earth is well. Mimi agrees that it’s all related, and Williams begins to connect the diseases of her female relatives to larger patterns in the decline of the planet’s health.
“Canada Geese”–“Dark-Eyed Junco” Summary and Analysis
“Great Blue Heron”–Epilogue Summary and Analysis
