My Story of Place Attachment
Welcome Home
“Welcome home!” Auggie Gleason called to us. He circled the scene with his arm before adding, “Sorry the place is such a mess.”
Looking up Forest Service Road 2207 into the Opal Creek watershed. The left image was taken in 2014, the right image in 2024, four years after the Beachie Creek Fire.
My husband Alex and I had arrived at the locked Forest Service gate at the start of Forest Road 2207 just moments before Auggie pulled up on a UTV from the opposite direction. We made our greetings then turned and faced up the Opal Creek drainage.
“The last caretaker that came to visit me met me here and said, ‘Wow, you’ve really let the place go!’” Auggie laughed.
The contours of the land, previously obscured in layers of soil, duff, flowers, shrubs, and an ancient forest overcoat, were visible. The whole place was rockier than I’d imagined, flayed to the bone by the 2020 Beachie Creek fire that had kept us out of the Opal Creek Wilderness since. I was seeing it in person for the first time.
I appreciated Auggie’s light-heartedness, but I wasn’t ready to laugh.
Place Attachment
I was writing a piece for work about the intersection of nature and design in the context of a nature immersion campus when I came across place attachment research. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but a pair of studies and a chapter from an environmental psychology textbook on the subject were so compelling I compulsively stashed them away in a folder. One that I went searching for three years later, in the winter after the Beachie Creek Fire.
Place attachment is a field of research interested in understanding the emotional bonds that develop between people and places. It is described as a phenomenon existing across a spectrum with the superficial delight of a tourist on one end, and rootedness — a depth of attachment that comes from the continuity of people in place over centuries — on the other.
Left: sharing Opal Creek with my Alex for the first time in 2014 (photo: Alana Kambury); Right: revisiting Opal Creek with Alex in July 2024 (photo: Alex Mondau).
Place attachment deepens with investments of time, learning, and attention. The deeper the attachment to a place on the part of a person or a group of people, the deeper the psychological benefits to them. Those benefits include the formation of memories, the sense of self-continuity through time, belonging, relaxation, positive emotions such as love and happiness, activity support such as access to recreation, physical and psychological comfort, opportunity for self-growth, stimulation, solitude, and beauty.
And place attachment benefits both its halves – the attached and the place. Place attachment researchers Robert Gifford and Leila Scannell write, “People with stronger place attachments tend to perform more pro-environmental behaviors, either as a direct attempt to preserve the place and protect it from damage, or as an indirect result of internalizing the community’s values of environmental protection.”
I worked for Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center from 2008 through 2014. I remember quoting Baba Dioum in our fundraising appeal letter one year – “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
The trail to Cedar Flats passes directly under the falls flowing off the Royal Baths, seen here in 2014 (left) and 2024 (right; photo: Alex Mondau).
In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.
—Baba Dioum
I didn’t know about place attachment science at the time, but I can now see that, alongside its curriculum, Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center taught and modeled place attachment for hundreds of outdoor school kids each year. Without naming it, we knew it to be a strong enough force to accomplish the work of conservation in the world.
I, like so many, learned how to love a place in Opal Creek, and that learning has benefitted me and all the places I’ve gone since.
In Action
The PVC pipe that had delivered Jawbone Flats’ water supply and power up until camp was evacuated in September 2020 looked like a thick ribbon of toasted marshmallow snaking up the steep creek bed to the intake a mile from camp. Auggie, Alex and I trampled through a thatch of native blackberries so ripe and plentiful that the hot air filled with the smell of freshly made jam.
We trampled through a thatch of native blackberries so ripe and plentiful that the hot air filled with the smell of freshly made jam.
In my six summer seasons with Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, we transitioned from dependably squeaking by on Flume Creek’s end of summer flow to dependably running out. But Auggie had built a new intake head in the pool just above the intake we’d always used. This upper pool was deeper and promised a more consistent water volume and pressure, one that lasted through the dry months of late summer. Auggie was eager to test it out.
The intake head dumped its volume into the shallower creekbed below. Auggie stood under it with a twenty gallon garbage can he’d hauled up, catching its contents. He shouted starts and stops I recorded with a phone timer. Alex took a video of our informal test, which we repeated half a dozen times. On average, the twenty gallon bucket filled in three seconds; the outflow was strong.
I watched Auggie carefully as he cared for the burned landscape over our two days of working with him in Opal Creek. He picked up scraps of twisted metal and puddles of melted PVC and organized them into trash heaps to be hauled out who knows when. He pulled invasive weeds that are beginning to pop up inside the gate. He cut back shrubs and dead trees encroaching on the road. He cleared the intake of the flume line and tested its flow. All without knowing the future of Jawbone Flats, without knowing if or when the flume line will be rebuilt.
He’d oriented us to the weekends’ chore list as we rode into camp with him. “I like to have projects for you to work on while you’re here,” he told us. “I’ve been bringing people in for the last four years, and I’ve seen that it really helps them to process what they’re seeing here, if they have some purpose.”
And it did. It also underlined for me that Opal Creek needs us as much as we need it, perhaps now more than ever. And the rest of the world needs us to have this orientation toward place – one of attachment that behaves as care. Now more than ever.
On the road into Jawbone Flats; the image on the left was taken in 2016, the image on the right was taken in 2024.
