On Attachment
“THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND!”
George shouted into a piercing blue sky, arms thrown upwards for emphasis. It was late June, the first good and hot day of summer. We were laying side by side on our backs on a velvety queen sized air mattress in The Narrows, a deep and clear stretch of the North Fork of the Santiam River on the edge of the Opal Creek Wilderness in the foothills of Oregon’s western Cascades.
George Atiyeh owned acreage along a significant length of the North Fork, a sanctuary he’d built for himself over decades on the edge of the old growth forest he had dedicated his life to protecting. The organization I found work with in 2008 just out of college, Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, had been founded by George in the initial conservation effort as Friends of Opal Creek.
“What do you think Jesus meant when he said that? ‘Get ready, it’s coming?’ No! He meant, ‘It’s fucking right here, you idiots! Look around you, this is heaven!’”
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Heaven was a pretty fixed concept in my Christian upbringing. We lingered over its particularities in church or at the dinner table in my parents’ home: streets paved with gold and houses made of precious materials studded with jewels.
When I pressed my parents for more details—would there be dogs there? would my grandfather be there?—I found the place toward which I was meant to orient the entirety of my earthly life alarmingly undesirable.
We were taught to deny ourselves attachment to this life. We were, as Hebrews 11:13 reminded us, strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
And then, in a turbulent stretch of life just as I was finishing high school, the church I grew up in disintegrated, I discarded my ill-fitting faith and untethered from everything that had held me under in childhood, bumbled my way through college, and found myself at Opal Creek, sizing up the world with a heart that was finally free to attach to it.
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The heaven described to me as a child had nothing on Opal Creek, or George’s place just outside its boundaries.
From the beach where George and I launched our air mattress, a small rapid spilled us through a pinch point, The Narrows, into a wide, deep pool of aquamarine water. I don’t know how deep this pool was—twenty feet? forty?—I never touched its bottom, but I could make out individual stones on its floor in the right light.
Rock walls rose up around us, maidenhair fern grew in the stone’s wet and shadowy cracks. Towering above us, their ground well above where we floated in the river, stretched fir and hemlock, alder and maple. The surface of the water and the walls of the canyon reflected light in glowing patches and sparkling points.
Vine and big leaf maple grew at the edges of the rocky beach launch and lined the dirt road that led to The Narrows from George’s house, tucked into trees a short walk away. Daisies grew in the grassy strip between two stripes worn bare by the tires of George’s old Chevy.
We had hauled a bucket of clay with us, dug from the bank just a brief way upstream. We had smeared ourselves from head to toe with the shimmering mud and we baked in the sun as George philosophized, arms wheeling wildly in the air.
I don’t remember how this conversation started, or how I came to be at George’s on this particular afternoon, but this bit has remained stubbornly etched in my memory since: George, smeared in clay, hammering the sky with his fists, pummeling the theology I grew up with.
“This is it, man,” he said reverently, letting his arms drop to his sides.
I squinted into the bright sun, waiting for words whose meanings had long ago been inscribed in my brain to rearrange themselves into this new understanding.
This is it, I thought.
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Place attachment—emotionally bonding to a place—is good for me. I’ve known this experientially and researchers Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford’s work illuminates why. By analyzing hundreds of written descriptions of study participants’ places of attachment, Scannell and Gifford have identified thirteen distinct psychological benefits derived from this type of emotional bond. Place attachment gives us a sense of belonging, a container for our memories, a sense of psychological and physical safety, a connection to nature, and opportunities for self-growth, among other compelling benefits.
When I hold my own narrative of belonging in Opal Creek up against Scannell and Gifford’s list of psychological benefits, I see clear evidence of each—Opal Creek has been a wellspring of goodness in my life.
But then the Labor Day 2020 Santiam Fire dramatically cleared the Opal Creek watershed of its ancient forest and took George’s life. As the smoke from the Santiam Fire that lingered across the Northwest for most of that September finally began to clear, I was left emotionally gutted wondering what less attachment might have felt like. Had the fire never happened, had George not died, my experience of place attachment at Opal Creek might have been an unqualified success, but I couldn’t help but wonder what pain I might’ve saved myself if Opal Creek for me had been just a job as it was to some, and not a homecoming, not an invitation into belonging, not the place that called me back to visit again and again.
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Before the fire, it was easy to think of Opal Creek as steadfast—stands of thousand year old trees have a way of making that impression.
“You’ll be immortal in this book,” George says affectionately to a grove of trees called Cedar Flats in author David Seideman’s 1993 book Showdown at Opal Creek. “Of course, you’re immortal anyway. The book is biodegradable. You’ll still be standing here.”
I too thought of Opal Creek as having an enduring quality, a noble constancy. “The pair of thousand-year-old western red cedars had already reached half a millennium the day Columbus set sail for the New World,” Seideman writes of the grove he visited with George that day. These trees had been growing for thirty-seven generations when my own family made their way to the “New World” in the early twentieth century, it was easy to imagine they’d still be standing there at Cedar Flats in another thousand years.
Of course I’d cognitively known that land is mutable and life is cyclical and death is sometimes dramatic in its arrival. I absolutely knew Opal Creek could burn.
Yet I absolutely expected it never would. But here I sit with Seideman’s book in my lap, and George is dead, and Cedar Flats burned to the ground. The 2020 Santiam Fire made the impermanence of the landscape newly real to me.
The loss stayed close, a shadow that followed me from waking life into dream space and back again. In dreams, I would announce to people—to complete strangers, apropos of nothing—“Opal Creek burned down. My friend George died.”
When it didn’t follow me into my dreams, it was the first reality to greet my cognition each morning upon awakening for what felt like a long time.
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Given the despair that lingered for months after the fire, I was left asking myself if braving attachment to a burning world was truly in my best interest. Maybe climate change was upending everything so thoroughly that the ability to form a meaningful attachment to place—what was once a powerful emotional asset—was now a liability.
My textbook chapter on place attachment, written by the same pair of researchers who convinced me of its merits, ventures into a discussion that “challenges the assumption that attachment is a good or necessary phenomenon.” It reads:
Some Buddhist philosophers depict any type of attachment as a negative force in which an individual grasps at or clings to the bond. A state of ‘non-attachment,’ in contrast, is said to offer a preferable state of flexibility, a lack of fixation on attachment objects, and tolerance to the impermanence of bonds. In this view, developing attachment bonds is not optimal [note 1].
I’ve taken this view into careful consideration these last few years, but still my heart craves attachment. I am neither theologian nor philosopher, Christian nor Buddhist, but for me, withholding an attachment to this world for the sake of remaining “flexible, unfixed, tolerant” feels too much like the “strangers and pilgrims'' dogma I learned as a kid. I can maybe see the logic in withholding attachment from something that is by its nature constantly changing, but I fail to see the beauty in it.
I can’t subscribe to a philosophy that would keep me as an individual or humanity as a species dissociated from the mutuality of aliveness that surrounds and holds me in place. I cannot detach my wellbeing from that of my place no matter how many religious or linguistic constructs I erect between us, so I’d rather remove them, for clarity’s sake.
My grief after the fire seemed bottomless for a season because my love for Opal Creek is deep and the loss was enormous—it was an appropriate mirror.
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With some distance, I can now see that while the fire was an enormous experience of loss, Opal Creek wasn’t lost. Similarly, my sense of attachment to Opal Creek hasn’t dissipated since the fire erased much of what I thought of as “there.” In fact, if anything, it’s expanded.
I’m left now feeling my way through the questions posed by this moment. How do I attach to a world in flux? How do I foster in myself a quality of resilient love, one that can withstand the accelerating rate of place disruption in the anthropocene? One that can survive wildfire?
Meanwhile, an enduring quality in Opal Creek has begun to shine through, one I’ve sensed from the physical distance between here and there though I have yet to go back. Shorn of many of its trees and all its cabins but one, that Opal Creek spirit—that unnamable sense that only that place can invoke—is there nonetheless, beckoning those of us who built community with each other there to return.
I have this sense that Opal Creek needs us in a way it never really did in its last iteration. It’s absolutely thrilling. It needs watchful eyes and strong backs, it needs witnesses and researchers and agents of regeneration. It seems to me like it’s inviting us deeper into relationship than ever before.
Opal Creek is probably not done breaking my heart, but neither is it done shaping it. That’s where I feel this pull back—in the scarred but yearning tissue of my heart, aching for reconnection.
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
