Beginnings
In the last week it’s rained nearly three inches. Three is not a particularly impressive integer, but it’s 7% of Bainbridge Island’s annual rainfall, all come in a seven day stretch. This island gets its rain in concentrated seasons, winter being the most prolific. And then, one day in early summer, the rain stops and doesn’t start again until the onset of fall. The weeks when we take on inches like this are generally the most extreme expression of winter’s energy here. Just as this week it’s hard to believe that in summer this place is hot, and by its end parched, by the driest weeks of summer the wet we’re experiencing this week will seem unfathomable.
The seasonal stream cutting through the ravine to the north of our house is running this week. This happens only a few times a year, only for a few days at a time, only when we get significant amounts of rain in relatively short timespans. Accompanying this especially wet week are unseasonably high temperatures. As the neighborhood settles into each evening’s silence, with our bedroom window and door open to the warm air, the whispering of the here for now creek and the chorus of the frogs who have come out of their winter slumber to sing alongside it come through.
“Attention is the hidden discipline of familiarity,” writes the poet David Whyte. With this orientation the year has become a succession of enchanting ephemera. This week we arrived at the halfway point in winter, and while much of life’s goings on are hidden from view in its first half, the season’s slow progression is finally becoming visible.
The buds on the trees are getting fatter day by day, signaling an emergence from their annual dormancy into post-dormancy. The onset of darkness in fall cues pre-dormancy in trees, the phase wherein preparations are made for winter. In dormancy, trees remain deeply asleep for what seems to be a genetically programmed duration of time, fixed and generally unaffected by outside conditions. Once this quota is met, sometime around mid winter, trees transition to their post-dormancy phase. The trees at this point are still protected from freezing temperatures, but are getting ready to grow, waiting only on the air to warm [notes 1 + 2].
And the air has warmed just enough for the Indian plum to bloom in the under canopy, the first of the year’s wild blossoms. They caught me by surprise this week, as they do each year, their delicate white flowers bravely cascading from the tips of bare twigs out into the winter air.
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I fell in love ten years ago, and within a few short months, already primed for a move, I left Portland for Bainbridge Island, a compromise between the big city proximity my partner needed and the wildness I craved.
We began exploring our new home immediately. Gazzam Lake Nature Preserve, a 400-acre forested park, was within walking distance of the little cottage we rented and we began familiarizing ourselves with its trails. My standard for wildness had been set by the forest scene I’d left behind in Oregon’s Opal Creek Wilderness. I worked for six years for an environmental education non-profit, Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, that operated out of a private in-holding in the wilderness, comprising a 35,000 acre watershed of old growth and ancient forest. Gazzam Lake paled in a comparison that was never fair.
Through my years of learning with Opal Creek, I knew upon first surveying Gazzam Lake that this forest was second growth and probably third growth in many areas—logged of its old growth at some point, and then, in places, logged again. Absent were old trees and layers in the canopy, two of the characteristics students at Opal Creek learned to look for as signs of forest health and maturity. It seemed though that what Gazzam Lake lacked in canopy layers it made up for in invasive species: English ivy, most predominantly, but also Himalayan blackberry, Scotch broom, and the occasional tangle of English holly.
It was nice to have a nature preserve so close to my new house, but this was not a forest I could love. I felt sure of that immediately.
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“The most consistent predictor of place attachment is the amount of time that an individual has spent in the place. Place attachments do not usually form instantaneously (although this is possible), but tend to strengthen with accumulated positive interactions, and memories that accrue after months and years” [note 3].
By the time I read these words some years later while researching “sense of place” for a piece I was working on, I had a very different relationship with Gazzam Lake. In the intervening years I had begun walking the trails through the preserve daily, initially as a means of recovering from a back surgery I had early one winter.
I’d wake up stiff in the morning and I craved my walk early, to warm and loosen myself. I often arrived at the trailhead at first light, peering into the shadowy tunnel of the path through the trees until it disappeared into nothing.
I walked slowly in the first weeks after surgery, and not too far—one wide loop through the park, less than two miles—on level ground. Once that began to feel easy I added a bit of out and back to Gazzam Lake at the center of the preserve. A spur trail left the main trail and led to the lake’s shore, thick with flora. A small clearing furnished with a worn smooth wood bench and an opening through the tangle provided views of the shallow lake beyond.
Here I would rest for a moment and listen to the chattering of eagles as they surfed thermals high over my head, or the harsh squawk of a heron as it came in to land in the still water of the lake. Reeds stood in thick tufts around its perimeter and rafts of ducks appeared and disappeared in their cover.
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I walked these trails daily through that winter’s months and my back recovered quickly. Some days I would wind up and down every length of trail within the preserve, touching the dead end of the road along the water and then turning to climb into the forest again; touching the beach easement at another trail’s terminus and then turning to climb again; down one spur trail through an old tree farm and up another that skirted behind houses that strained for peek-a-boo views of the Salish Sea through the trees. I could easily loop and double back and spend three, four hours at a time in the woods.
I didn’t have the language of place attachment then, I didn’t know, cognitively, that the investments of time I was making in this relationship with Gazzam Lake were strengthening it. I wouldn’t discover the research on place attachment for two more years. But I could feel myself being drawn in.
All at once one day, in a bit of an aha! moment as I paused on the leeward side of a particularly elegant cedar, crouched on my heels with my spine pressed against her trunk to rest my low back, I realized I was falling, had fallen, for this place.
Notes:
Purcell, L. “What Do Trees Do in Winter?” Purdue University, Department of Forestry and Natural Resources. March 2021. Accessed on February 1, 2024. https://www.purdue.edu/fnr/extension/what-do-trees-do-in-the-winter/
Shen, L. “How Do Trees Know When to Wake Up?” Northern Woodlands. January 2011. Accessed on February 1, 2024. https://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/how-do-trees-know-when-to-wake-up#:~:text=And%20because%20the%20post%2Ddormant,trees%20to%20open%20their%20buds.
Scannell, L. and R. Gifford. “The Psychology of Place Attachment.” Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice, 5 ed. January 2014. Accessed on February 3, 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279718543_The_psychology_of_place_attachment