Beginnings, part three
Although time certainly plays a role in place attachment, it is not always required; sometimes place attachments form more quickly, almost like love at first sight. This is more likely to occur when individuals experience congruence; the term place-congruent continuity describes the sense that a particular place fits with aspects of the self [note 1].
I experienced love at first sight once, upon moving from the Midwest to the Northwest for the second time, post college, and stumbling into a job and a community at Opal Creek.
A week after I was hired by Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center in the autumn of 2008, I visited the Opal Creek Wilderness and Jawbone Flats, the private inholding owned by the non-profit and operated as an off-grid outdoor school, for the first time. Nothing I’d read about the place prepared me for what I encountered when I first arrived at the locked forest service gate that marks the trailhead into Jawbone Flats, a few miles down a narrow, precariously bridged road.
The trees, though I’d read of their girth and height and volume and board feet, had presence and grandeur beyond any quantifiable descriptions. And the water—its clarity, its color, its textures as it flowed from swift current to cascade to eddy—I had no reference for beauty like this and it astonished me completely when I first encountered it.
What I found in the Opal Creek Wilderness that day was the most peaceful landscape I’d yet encountered inhabited by a group of people who, like me, seemed to thrive on nature. They spent all their time outside—recreating, working, growing and gathering food, and learning—and this orientation seemed to make them genuinely happy. Their belonging, both in natural and human communities, seemed so secure, so easy, and that sense of belonging was extended to me immediately.
The beauty surrounding me as I wandered into camp and this community for the first time and hiked the trail through the wilderness to Whetstone Mountain the next day confirmed what I’d suspected upon first seeing the job posting on Craigslist: I was meant to make my way to Opal Creek. Arriving in Jawbone Flats for the first time felt like a homecoming.
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In the six years I worked for the organization, initially as registrar and ultimately as a grant and communications writer, I spent as much time as I could in the wilderness. I lived and worked in Portland, but my executive director, to her credit and in gratitude forever, understood that I needed to have regular and meaningful immersion in the wilderness in which our work centered if my job was to be done well. She encouraged me to spend as much time as I could in Opal Creek.
I learned many of the trails throughout the watershed intimately, walking their lengths at all times of the day and night, in all seasons. I learned about the plant and animal communities that populated the forest and aquatic environments. I gleaned as much information as I could about this place from walking it with the organization’s science instructors, visiting workshop instructors, and experts of various kinds. I familiarized myself with the use of field guides and identification books. I listened to stories late into the night. I read, read, read.
A natural and insatiable curiosity led me to lose time in rapt attention at the edge of the creek, or on my back peering into the canopy of half a dozen thousand-year-old trees, or within the splash zone of a waterfall.
Certain named places—Cedar Flats (where stood the most unfathomably exquisite stand of ancient cedars I’ve ever seen, upstream from which stood another equally impressive stand of fir), Opal Pool, Mossy Lonesome, Pablo’s Chair, Sacred Rock, Skyhouse—demanded respects paid at regular intervals. When I sensed it had been too long, I would make my visitations, seeking out these places as long lost friends.
I came to feel known by the place in return. The very land, spiny in places and covered in feet thick layers of duff in others, breathed. When I could sit still long enough I was overwhelmed with the sensation of all of us, myself and the host of life surrounding me, breathing together, intimately exchanging oxygen and carbon in reverent silence.
Without knowing I was looking for it, that I’d previously lacked it, or that I’d even found my way into it, I was in a relationship with this place. It blossomed in the years I worked there and visited regularly and even when I left the organization and moved a state away, that sense of belonging in Opal Creek remained and was reinforced with each visit.
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I find it difficult to put a boundary around home now—is it Bainbridge Island? Puget Sound? Western Washington?
The Pacific Northwest feels too broad a range to consider its entirety home, but might I, given I’ve lived all over this region in the last twenty years? Given my strong connection to Opal Creek?
Is one even capable of attaching to a place as broadly defined and ecologically diverse as the Pacific Northwest?
Might I be looking for a more poetic definition? Maybe home for me is the natural range of the western red cedar, for example, or simply the area in which life’s expressions—flora and fauna—are familiar to me by name.
What about the places I’ve lived and left that are hundreds or thousands of miles away? Might home for some be a single and specific place and for others be a blend of places, a patchwork quilt of past and present?
What about places that were once home but have been taken in some way, altered beyond recognition?
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Sometimes, the value of a place is revealed most clearly to us when the settings we hold most dear are threatened or lost [note 2].
On Labor Day 2020, a raging wildfire—started deep in an inaccessible fold of the mountains by lightning strike a month before and fanned into a 300,000 acre conflagration by a wind storm—consumed much of the 35,000 acre Opal Creek Wilderness, including the 15 acre Jawbone Flats environmental education center, the grove of ancients at Cedar Flats, Skyhouse, and the area surrounding Opal Pool.
My friend George Atiyeh, the conservationist who led the efforts to protect Opal Creek in the 80s and 90s and lived at the edge of the wilderness, failed to evacuate and died in the same fire that leveled the forest he’d dedicated his life to saving.
George called Opal Creek his heart’s home and many, myself included, repeated him. We said things like, “When I die, take me home to Jawbone.” We joked in all seriousness that the Opal Creek Wilderness and Jawbone Flats were our apocalypse plan. We imagined this primordial forest would remain constant even as the rest of the world devolved around it.
And then it went up in flames.
Concluded next week.
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
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
