[nfbmi-talk] FW: [stylist] creative nonfiction essay "Clan of theOne-breasted Women" by Terry Tempest Williams one of my favorites

[joe harcz Comcast]

Dear Fred,

Here's another bite at this most apt moral apple and again, up front thank 
you for this post...

One of the folks I most admire in her life and absolutely the best teacher I 
ever had in the postsecondary environment was Sue Ponchillia. Sue fought an 
heroic battle against breast cancer and lost it ultimately in 2009. I got 
the message while I was visiting my girlfriend in Philly. I will admit now 
that I simply sat at the computer and cried relentlessly for about a half 
hour. In fact I get misty thinking about it to this day for the loss, both 
personal and collectively was that profound.

Many, including some in NFB have taken points with what for lack of better 
words might be called the "Western Michigan" veiws of rehabilitation of the 
blind. In fact Sue and I debated some of the finer points on those very 
issues.

If she were alive today we'd likely continue that debating society for lack 
of better words.

But, there is no doubt in my mind that sue was not only gifted as a leader, 
but also the best of all words a gifted teacher.

she was again a blessed teacher for lack of better words for she profoundly 
impacted all those who knew her.

I literally was a student at Western under Sue's tutelage while she 
literally had a radical masctemoy and yet she continued on for five or more 
years doing all she could do to make good happen in the world and good 
happen for folks who are blind.

I had to leave the program at the tail end for personal reasons which sue 
understood and that still exist to this day.

Many, in NFB have some issues with the methods and all that taught at 
Western. some are on point. some are not.

But, no one thinks that Sue and her husband Paul are not  totally motivated 
for the advancement of all humanity let alone those of us who are blind. I 
use the present tense not because I'm really really religious, for truth be 
told I'm not so...That's just me and a personal aside...

I use the present tense because brave and noble women like Sue live somehow 
inside of me. And great teachers live inside of me.

Sue also practiced what she preached. she taught me the code of ethics for 
Rehab Teachers (now called Vision Rehabilitation Therapists).

The tragedy was tthat we need a million Sue's out there and we are sold 
short when they are taken so soon from us. Ironically while I was a student 
there I was about ffour years older than Sue who accomplished so much in her 
rather short life.



totally m
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred wurtzel" <f.wurtzel at comcast.net>
To: "'NFB of Michigan Internet Mailing List'" <nfbmi-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 11:37 PM
Subject: [nfbmi-talk] FW: [stylist] creative nonfiction essay "Clan of 
theOne-breasted Women" by Terry Tempest Williams one of my favorites


> hello,
>
> Now, here is some powerful writing which came from our writers list.  The
> topic is not blindness, however, if you read it, you can see that struggle
> against injustice has no boundaries.  We are always talking about real
> people with real feelings.  It may be hard to understand but the opressors
> are hurting.   They hurt others with no compassion, no matter the excuse,
> being national defense, lack of funds, lack of time, the non-cooperation,
> laziness and defiance of clients, you name it, they always have an excuse
> for creating fear, intimidation and pain in others.
>
> We need peace and justice and we need it now.
>
> Warmest Regards,
>
> Fred
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Bridgit Pollpeter
> Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 10:00 PM
> To: stylist at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [stylist] creative nonfiction essay "Clan of the One-breasted
> Women" by Terry Tempest Williams one of my favorites
>
> This is one of my favorite CNF essays by Terry Tempest Williams. I
> thought I'd share it for others to read. I'm sure it will resonate with
> many of you for many reasons.
>
> The Clan of the One-Breasted Women
>
> Terry Tempest Williams
>
> 426
>
> I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers,
> and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who
> survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.
>
> I've had my own problems: two biopsies for breast cancer and a small
> tumor between my ribs diagnosed as a ''borderline malignancy."
>
> This is my family history.
>
> Most statistics tell us breast cancer is genetic, hereditary, with
> rising percentages attached to fatty diets, childlessness, or becoming
> pregnant after thirty. What they don't say is living in Utah may be the
> greatest hazard of all.
>
> We are a Mormon family with roots in Utah since 1847. The "word of
> wisdom" in my family aligned us with good foods-no coffee, no tea,
> tobacco, or alcohol. For the most part, our women were finished having
> their babies by the time they were thirty. And only one faced
>
>
>
>
> The Clan of One-Breasted Women         427
>
>
>
> breast cancer prior to I960. Traditionally, as a group of people,
> Mormons have a low rate of cancer.
>
> Is our family a cultural anomaly? The truth is, we didn't think about
> it. Those who did, usually the men, simply said, "bad genes." The
> women's attitude was stoic. Cancer was part of life. On February 16,
> 19^1. the eve of my mother's surgery. I accidently picked up the
> telephone and overheard her ask my grandmother what she could expect.
>
> "Diane, it is one of the most spiritual experiences you will ever
> encounter."
>
> 1 quietly put down the receiver.
>
> Two clays later, my father took my brothers and me to the hospital to
> visit her. She met us in the lobby in a wheelchair. No bandages were
> visible. I'll never forget her radiance, the way she held herself in a
> purple velvet robe and how she gathered us around her.
>
> "Children, I am fine. I want you to know I felt the arms of God around
> me."
>
> We believed her. My father cried. Our mother, his wife, was thirty-
> eight years old.
>
> A little over a year after Mother's death. Dad and I were having dinner
> together. He had just returned from St. George, where the Tempest
> Company was completing the gas lines that would service southern Utah.
> He spoke of his love for the country, the sandstoned landscape,
> bare-boned and beautiful. He had just finished hiking the Kolob trail in
> Zion National Park. We got caught up in reminiscing, recalling with
> fondness our walk up Angel's Landing on his fiftieth birthday and the
> years our family had vacationed there.
>
> Over dessert, I shared a recurring dream of mine. 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.
>
> "You did see it." he said.
>
> "Saw what?"
>
> "The bomb. The cloud. We were driving home from Riverside, California.
> You were sitting on Diane's lap. She was pregnant. In fact. I remember
> the day, September 7, 1957. We had just gotten out of the Service. We
> were driving north, past Las Vegas. It was an hour or so before dawn,
> when this explosion went off. We not only heard it. but felt it. 1
> thought the oil tanker in front of us had blown up. 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."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 428            PART IV   Anthology
>
>
>
> I stared at my father.
>
> "I thought you knew that," he said. "It was a common occurrence in the
> fifties."
>
> It was at this moment that I realized the deceit I had been living
> under. Children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking
> contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated
> breasts of their mothers, my mother-members, years later, of the Clan of
> One-Breasted Women.
>
> It is a well-known story in the Desert West, "The Day We Bombed Utah."
> or more accurately, the years we bombed Utah: above ground atomic
> testing in Nevada took place from January 27. 1951 through July 11,
> 1962. Not only were the winds blowing north covering ''low- use segments
> of the population'1 with fallout and leaving sheep dead in their tracks,
> but the climate was right. The United States of the 1950s was red,
> white, and blue. The Korean War was raging. McCarthyism  was rampant.
> Ike was it, and the cold war was hot. If you were against nuclear
> testing, you were for a communist regime.
>
> Much has been written about this "American nuclear tragedy." Public
> health was secondary to national security. The Atomic Energy
> Commissioner, Thomas Murray, said, "Gentlemen, we must not let anything
> interfere with the series of tests, nothing."
>
> Again and again, the American public was told by its government, in
> spite of burns, blisters, and nausea, "It has been found that the tests
> may be conducted with adequate assurance of safety under conditions
> prevailing at the bombing reservations." Assuaging public fears was
> simply a matter of public relations. "Your best action," an Atomic
> Energy Commission booklet read, "is not to be worried about fallout." A
> news release typical of the times stated. "We find no basis for
> concluding that harm to any individual has resulted from radioactive
> fallout."
>
> On August 30, 1979, during Jimmy Carter's presidency, a suit was filed,
> Irene Allen v. The United States of America. Mrs. Allen's case was the
> first on an alphabetical list of twenty-four test cases, representative
> of nearly twelve hundred plaintiffs seeking compensation from the United
> States government for cancers caused by nuclear testing in Nevada.
>
> Irene Allen lived in Hurricane, Utah. She was the mother of five
> children and had been widowed twice. Her first husband, with their two
> oldest boys, had watched the tests from the roof of the local high
> school. He died of leukemia in 1956. Her second husband died of
> pancreatic cancer in 1978.
>
> In a town meeting conducted by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, shortly before
> the suit was filed, Mrs. Allen said, "I am not blaming the government, I
> want you to know that. Senator Hatch. But I thought if
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The Clan of One-Breasted Women         429
>
>
>
> my testimony could help in any way so this wouldn't happen again to any
> of the generations coming up after us ... I am happy to be here this day
> to bear testimony of this."
>
> God-fearing people. This is just one story in an anthology of thousands.
>
> On May 10. 1984, Judge Bruce S. Jenkins handed down his opinion. Ten of
> the plaintiffs were awarded damages. It was the first time a federal
> court had determined that nuclear tests had been the cause of cancers.
> For the remaining fourteen test cases, the proof of causation was not
> sufficient. In spite of the split decision, it was considered a landmark
> ruling. It was not to remain so for long.
>
> In April 1987, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge
> Jenkins's ruling on the ground that the United States was protected from
> suit by the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity, a centuries-old idea
> from England in the days of absolute monarchs.
>
> In January 1988, the Supreme Court refused to review the Appeals Court
> decision. To our court system it does not matter whether the United
> States government was irresponsible, whether it lied to its citizens, or
> even that citizens died from the fallout of nuclear testing. What
> matters is that our government is immune: "The King can do no wrong."
>
> In Mormon culture, authority is respected, obedience is revered, and
> independent thinking is not. I was taught as a young girl not to ''make
> waves'' or ''rock the boat."
>
> "Just let it go," Mother would say. "You know how you feel, that's what
> counts."
>
> For many years, I have done just that-listened, observed, and quietly
> formed my own opinions, in a culture that rarely asks questions because
> it has all the answers. But one by one, I have watched the women in my
> family die common, heroic deaths. We sat in waiting rooms hoping for
> good news, but always receiving the bad. I cared for them, bathed their
> scarred bodies, and kept their secrets. I watched beautiful women become
> bald as Cytoxan, cisplatin, and Adriamycin were injected into their
> veins. I held their foreheads as they vomited green-black bile, and I
> shot them with morphine when the pain became inhuman. In the end. I
> witnessed their last peaceful breaths, becoming a midwife to the rebirth
> of their souls.
>
> The price of obedience has become too high.
>
> The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed
> rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons
> is the same fear I saw in my mother's body. Sheep. Dead sheep. The
> evidence is buried.
>
> I cannot prove that my mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, or my grandmothers,
> Lettie Romney Dixon and Kathryn Blackett Tempest,
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 430            PART IV   Anthology
>
>
>
> along with my aunts developed cancer from nuclear fallout in Utah. But I
> can't prove they didn't.
>
> My father's memory was correct. The September blast we drove through in
> 1957 was part of Operation Plumbbob, one of the most intensive series of
> bomb tests to be initiated. The flash of light in the night in the
> desert, which I had always thought was a dream, developed into a family
> nightmare. It took fourteen years, from 1957 to 1971, for cancer to
> manifest in my mother-the same time, Howard L. Andrews, an authority in
> radioactive fallout at the National Institutes of Health, says radiation
> cancer requires to become evident. The more I learn about what it means
> to be a "downwinder," the more questions I drown in.
>
> What I do know, however, is that as a Mormon woman of the fifth
> generation of Latter-day Saints, I must question everything, even if it
> means losing my faith, even if it means becoming a member of a border
> tribe among my own people. Tolerating blind obedience in the name of
> patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
>
> When the Atomic Energy Commission described the country north of the
> Nevada Test Site as "virtually uninhabited desert terrain,'' my family
> and the birds at Great Salt Lake were some of the "virtual
> uninhabitants."
>
>
>
> One night, I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing
> fire in the desert. They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in
> their bellies and wax and wane with its phases. They mocked the
> presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that they would
> never fear the witch inside themselves. The women danced wildly as
> sparks broke away from the flames and entered the night sky as stars.
>
> And they sang a song given to them by Shoshone grandmothers:
>
>
>
> Ah ne nah, nah                           Consider the rabbits
>
> nin nah nah-                             How gently they walk on the
> earth-
>
> ah ne nah, nah                             Consider the rabbits
>
> nin nah nah-                             How gently they walk on the
> earth-
>
> Nyaga mutzi                               We remember them
>
> oh ne nay-                                We can walk gently also-
>
> A'yaga mutzi                              We remember them
>
> oh ne nay-                                We can walk gently also-
>
>
>
> The women danced and drummed and sang for wreeks, preparing themselves
> for what was to come. They would reclaim the desert for the sake of
> their children, for the sake of the land.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The Clan of One-Breasted Women         431
>
>
>
> A few miles downwind from the fire circle, bombs were being tested.
> Rabbits felt the tremors. Their soft leather pads on paws and feet
> recognized the shaking sands, while the roots of mesquite and sage were
> smoldering. Rocks were hot from the inside out and dust devils hummed
> unnaturally. And each time there was another nuclear test, ravens
> watched the desert heave. Stretch marks appeared. The land was losing
> its muscle.
>
> The women couldn't bear it any longer. They were mothers. They had
> suffered labor pains but always under the promise of birth. The red hot
> pains beneath the desert promised death only, as each bomb became a
> stillborn. A contract had been made and broken between human beings and
> the land. A new contract was being drawn by the women, who understood
> the fate of the earth as their own.
>
> Under the cover of darkness, ten women slipped under a barbed- wire
> fence and entered the contaminated country. They were trespassing. They
> walked toward the town of Mercury, in moonlight, taking their cues from
> coyote, kit fox, antelope squirrel, and quail. They moved quietly and
> deliberately through the maze of Joshua trees. When a hint of daylight
> appeared they rested, drinking tea and sharing their rations of food.
> The women closed their eyes. The time had come to protest writh the
> heart, that to deny one's genealogy with the earth was to commit treason
> against one's soul.
>
> At dawn, the women draped themselves in mylar, wrapping long streamers
> of silver plastic around their arms to blow in the breeze. They wore
> clear masks, that became the faces of humanity. And when they arrived at
> edge of Mercury, they carried all the butterflies of a summer day in
> their wombs. They paused to allow their courage to settle.
>
> The town that forbids pregnant women and children to enter because of
> radiation risks was asleep. The women moved through the streets as
> winged messengers, twirling around each other in slow motion, peeking
> inside homes and watching the easy sleep of men and women. They were
> astonished by such stillness and periodically would utter a shrill note
> or low cry just to verify life.
>
> The residents finally awoke to these strange apparitions. Some simply
> stared. Others called authorities, and in time, the women were
> apprehended by wary soldiers dressed in desert fatigues. They were taken
> to a white, square building on the other edge of Mercury. When asked who
> they were and why they were there, the women replied, "We are mothers
> and we have come to reclaim the desert for our children."
>
> The soldiers arrested them. As the ten women were blindfolded and
> handcuffed, they began singing:
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 432            PART IV   Anthology
>
>
>
> You can't forbid us eveiything You can't forbid us to think- You can't
> forbid our tears to flow And you can't stop the songs that we
>
>
>
> The women continued to sing louder and louder, until they heard the
> voices of their sisters moving across the mesa:
>
>
>
> Ah ne nah, nah nin nah nah- Ah ne nah, nah nin nah nah- Nyaga mutzi oh
> ne nav- Nyaga mutzi oh ne nay-
>
>
>
> "Call for reinforcements," one soldier said.
>
> "We have," interrupted one woman, "we have-and you have no idea of our
> numbers."
>
>
>
> I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine
> other Utahns for trespassing on military lands. They are still
> conducting nuclear tests in the desert. Ours was an act of civil
> disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more
> than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the clan of
> One-Breasted Women.
>
> As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked
> my body. She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.
>
> "And these?" she asked sternly.
>
> "Weapons," I replied.
>
> Our eyes met. I smiled. She pulled the leg of my trousers back over my
> boot.
>
> "Step forward, please," she said as she took my arm.
>
> We were booked under an afternoon sun and bused to Tonopah, Nevada. It
> was a two-hour ride. This was familiar country. The Joshua trees
> standing their ground had been named by my ancestors, who believed they
> looked like prophets pointing west to the Promised Land. These were the
> same trees that bloomed each spring, flowers appearing like white flames
> in the Mojave. And I recalled a full moon
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The Clan of One-Breasted Women         433
>
>
>
> in May, when Mother and I had walked among them, flushing out mourning
> doves and owls.
>
> The bus stopped short of town. We were released.
>
> The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the
> desert with no way to get home. What they didn't realize was that we
> were home, soul-centered and strong, women who recognized the sweet
> smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.
>
>
>
> Terry Tempest Williams
>
> Much qfTeny Tempest Williams' writing explores how the natural landscape
> affects us. both politically arid personally. She is best known for her
> book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her other books
> include a collection of essays. An Unspoken Hunger, Desert Quartet: An
> Erotic Landscape. Leap, and Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert. She
> has also written two children's books. The Secret Language of Snow" and
> Between Cattails. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications,
> including the New Yorker, the Nation, Outside, Orion, the Iowa Review,
> and Audubon, and she edited the book Testimony: Writers Speak on Behalf
> of Utah Wilderness. She has served on the Governing Council of the
> Wilderness Society and as natural ist-in-resideuce al the Utah Museum of
> Natural History, and today she serves on the advisory board of the
> National Parks and Conservation Association, The Nature Conservatory,
> and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. Williams has received many
> awards, among them induction to the Rachel Carson Honor Roll and the
> National Wildlife Federation's Conservation Award for Special
> Achievement. Born in Corona. California in 1955. she lives in Castle
> Valley. Utah.
>
>
>
>
> Sincerely,
> Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter
> Read my blog at:
> <http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/>
> http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/
>
> "History is not what happened; history is what was written down."
> The Expected One- Kathleen McGowan
>
> _______________________________________________
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