Beginnings, part four
In the months following the Labor Day Santiam Fire that leveled Jawbone Flats and decimated the Opal Creek Wilderness, I experienced a quality of grief previously unknown to me. I spent the winter in what felt like a bottomless despair marked by complete incredulity at the rain that fell in sheets, slaking the land so thoroughly that it ran in ribbons down every channel, gully, and furrow willing to convey it to the sea. Disbelief that in summer this same place was so parched and vulnerable; where was this rain when we needed it?
I couldn’t bring myself to watch any of the flyover footage of the decimated ancient forest, but I tortured myself imagining it anyway. When I was successful at redirecting my thoughts in my conscious hours, the images haunted my dreams.
My inability to conceptualize home, and the admission that Opal Creek was many things to me, but in a literal sense it was truly never my home in that I never lived there for more than a couple weeks at a time, etched me. As an employee, I had longed to live in Jawbone Flats surrounded by the wilderness, and somehow, even after moving on from the organization and out of state, I held onto this possibility of spending an entire season, or an entire year, in Opal Creek at some point. Improbable as that might’ve been, it was now impossible.
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Somewhere in all of this swirling grief my nagging questions about home sent me in search of the chapter on place attachment I’d saved from a research and writing project I’d completed for work a couple years previously. The subject was so compelling to me at the time, though only tangentially related to what I was working on, that I impulsively stashed some content away—a couple experiments and the chapter by Scannell and Gifford from an environmental psychology textbook.
I scanned the thirty pages; about halfway through, the heading Place Loss jumped out at me and I slowed down to read it carefully. The authors described the work of researchers documenting responses to displacement of a number of communities from their environments, in which they qualify the grief exhibited as “comparable to the effects of separation from a loved one.” That felt accurate.
But, they went on to say, the grief of displacement can be soothed by finding settings that refer to the lost place in some way. They said that finding home-like qualities in a new place, bringing in objects from the lost home place, and even creating symbolic representations of it, all eased the pain of loss. “In a psychological sense,” they wrote, “a person is not truly displaced when surrounded by referents of home” [note 1].
I had done this; I had gathered my Opal Creek curiosities around me: a collection of concretions George and I spent one 4th of July afternoon digging out of his riverbank; a core sample I found in the forest one day, a relic of Opal Creek’s mining history; a grocery bag filled with lichen pulled from a tree in Jawbone Flats my first winter with the organization and used annually as streamers on my Christmas tree.
I also had been poring over hundreds of pictures, including a beautiful photobook my boss made me as a parting gift when I left the organization.
I brimmed when I first recognized my new home on Bainbridge Island in the pictures of the cabins lined up along the road through Jawbone Flats. That winter after the fire Alex and I moved into the house we’d designed and built for ourselves which was obviously (but unconsciously) enormously influenced by the lost Opal Creek cabins.
Even the Gazzam Lake cedar grove was reminiscent enough of Cedar Flats to provide some solace. I was truly surrounded by referents of home if I took a generous view of my new place and I took from them the comfort I could.
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I once heard the philosopher-writer Alain de Botton talk in an interview about the perfecting work of love. To love someone, he said, was partly to see them for who they are and partly to see them for who they could become, to see in them already the fully actualized person they aspire to be. In this way to love each other is to ennoble each other and dream each other into being [note 2].
Gazzam Lake is a whole new place to me since the fire. I visit the cedar grove regularly still, and I imagine the trees there in another thousand years, caught up to the age of the lost Cedar Flats grove in Opal Creek, now again a sapling nursery. I’ve begun to think of it as the future’s old growth forest, and it has since been endowed with a nobility I can’t fail to recognize.
I’ve begun to take it more seriously, to find more to admire in the way it stubbornly keeps at life despite having been hacked to the ground, twice in places, and infiltrated with weeds. And I’ve begun to take my responsibility toward it more seriously too, asking myself what I can do now to encourage this place along toward its fullest potential. I still pull ivy from the margins of the trails; I long to do more.
Opal Creek, too, is on its way to becoming an ancient forest again. While the wilderness area remains closed to the public, the organization continues its caretaking work of Jawbone Flats and the road and trails accessing it. It also continues its work of environmental education, and has set up long term experimental plots in the rapidly regenerating forest to observe what comes back, and how it compares with what grew there previously.
Future students of the rebuilt Jawbone Flats education center will be able to contribute to a living body of research on post fire ecological recovery. They’ll be able to witness climate-change driven redistribution and migration of tree species. They’ll get to know, and eventually come to love, the aspiring old growth forest.
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Where is home now?
I’m working on a definition, one that is more of a philosophical orientation than a physical pin in a map.
I’m interested in the behaviors that reflect a sense of belonging strong enough to call home. I’m curious about the care that love elicits and familiarity invites. I’m exploring the idea of home as the place, places, I know well enough to care for.
I think of George and his love’s output—a decades long legal and political struggle, an attachment so deep and a love so persistent a wilderness was created; I think of the man I came across in Gazzam Lake, sawing down holly because it simply had to be done.
I’ve been invited into Opal Creek. It’s winter, so access is an issue currently, but I expect that when the snows melt and the road clears I’ll make my way in, hopefully with a group of friends, hopefully with some objective, some meaningful task of practicality, some essential act of regeneration. I’m ready to witness what has transpired since my last visit. I’m eager to get to work dreaming into the future and rebuilding.
While I’m waiting to get into Opal Creek, I’m cutting holly. I noticed yesterday on my walk through Gazzam Lake that the very holly knot where I encountered that man and his hacksaw has sprouted again. Its shoots are two feet tall. It’s time to hack it back again, and I haven’t seen the guardian of this slope since the first time I encountered him, years ago now. It’s my turn.
Notes:
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
Alain de Botton. “The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships.” "On Being with Krista Tippett, February 9, 2017. https://onbeing.org/programs/alain-de-botton-the-true-hard-work-of-love-and-relationships/
