Place Attachment Primer: Place
“What did it feel like, being back in Jawbone?” they asked.
“Good!” Alex and I both enthused. “Wonderful, really, and…”
And all the trees were dead. I’d seen footage and images and I went well prepared for what we encountered when we finally faced the reality of the new Opal Creek Wilderness in person, and still.
We didn’t know what to say next. We knew our friends were wary of the idea of visiting again, but ever since we’d said goodbye to Auggie and driven out of the Opal Creek Wilderness that afternoon I’d been obsessed with the idea of revisiting with the dearest of my Opal Creek community.
I tried to choose my words carefully, but they stumbled out of my mouth nonetheless and fell in a blunt force heap, “I mean, everything is dead.”
Before we’d gone back into the Opal Creek Wilderness for the first time since the 2020 Beachie Creek Fire roared through, I’d imagined there must be pockets of living trees in places. Wildfires tend to burn in mosaic patterns, surely there were green stands here and there. I expected to be able to put some kind of pacifying number to it. Perhaps I would find twenty percent of the trees had survived.
“Stand replacing” was a term I’d read in reference to the Beachie Creek Fire within the Opal Creek drainage, in particular. “Worst case scenario.” It took facing it to fully appreciate these words. Out of 100 trees, 100 were dead. We could spot a stand of green trees in several pockets, but they were small, many of them experiencing delayed mortality due to the extreme change in their environment. Out of 1,000 trees, 1,000 were dead.
Auggie oriented us to the fire damage over the two days and nights we spent in Jawbone Flats with him. In places, as when we hiked up Flume Creek in the Opal Creek drainage, the fire was severe enough that many trees were charred to nubbins. The rest had blown down in the firestorm’s hurricane-force winds creating a hellscape of pickup sticks that stretched up the canyon as far as the eye could see.
And the eye could see. Much farther than ever before. Opal Creek is a temperate rainforest; the visibility in the under-canopy before the fire had been limited despite the forest’s maturity. Now the contours of the land were newly visible, like some mean spirited parent had come through one morning and in one swipe snapped the velvety green duvet right off the slumbering form beneath it.
In other places, as when we came in on the road that runs between the gate and Jawbone Flats, the 1920s era mining town where the organization’s education center was before it burned down, the fire burned less severely and moved through more quickly. The effects were still deadly, but differently so.
“The fire ecologists called this dragons’ breath,” Auggie told us as we jostled along in the UTV at dusk on our way into camp the first night. “If you look carefully, you’ll see that the trees are completely intact, they still have their branches, even their twigs. This ball of flame came hurtling through here and killed everything it touched. But just barely.”
Auggie warned us of the land’s new pitfalls each time we ventured off the trail. “Some of the trees burned all the way to the root tips and left gaping holes in the ground,” he said, pulling aside a thatch of trailing blackberry to expose a burn scar deep enough to leave anyone who stumbled into it below ground level. They were impossible to see, covered as they were with the profusion of life bounding back in the burn scar. We moved tentatively.
I remembered reading on the Beachie Creek Fire InciWeb page – a multi-agency repository of wildfire data – that at one point the fire was growing by 90 acres per second. I remembered reading about its rate of advance and realizing that it was such that even the fleetest of animals with the endurance required wouldn’t have been able to outrun or outfly it. I remembered all the natural history spotlights I’d written for Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center in my six years of employment with the organization. I would include population density information, and then, with simple math, estimate the population within the Opal Creek Wilderness: twenty-six black bear, as many as one hundred and thirty-seven endangered Northern Spotted Owls, two point three cougar. The acreage comprising the Wilderness was only a third of the acreage that burned in the Beachie Creek Fire and a mere 8% of the acreage burned in the Santiam Fire (the name of the merged Beachie Creek and adjacent Lionshead Fires). I remember my heart breaking open even more as this reality settled in.
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The third component of place attachment – after considering who is attached and how one is attached – is place. To what is the attachment made? In place attachment research, place is conceptualized in social and physical contexts. Social attachment is called belongingness by social psychologists.
“Part of social place bonding involves attachment to the others with whom individuals interact in their place, and part of it involves attachment to the social group that the place represents. This latter type of attachment, and recognition that the place symbolizes one’s social group, is closely aligned with place identity,” write Gifford and Scannell in Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Framework.
At Opal Creek, the social relationships and group identity were baked into the gig. We – the employees of Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center and residents of Jawbone Flats – called ourselves Jawboners. ‘Boners for short. Gifford and Scannell continue, “One is attached to the place because it facilitates ‘distinctiveness’ from other places, or affirms the specialness of one’s group.” Opal Creek’s distinctiveness from other places, the specialness, was the place itself. The place itself lured us in and created the container for the community that thrived within it. The place itself fueled the passion for the old growth forest education and conservation work we engaged in. “Opal Creek is the only environmental education school in Oregon that teaches old growth forest ecology in an old growth forest. Opal Creek is the largest remaining intact tract of old growth in the state; the entire watershed is protected from ridgeline to ridgeline.” I wrote some variation on those sentences in every grant application we ever submitted. To us, Opal Creek’s distinctiveness was self-evident and we were its champions.
“Community attachment researchers assume that attachment to a place means attachment to those who live there and to the social interactions that the place affords them,” write Gifford and Scannell. “These definitions suggest that social place attachment…[centers] upon the place as an arena for social interactions, or as a symbol for one’s social group. However, attachment obviously can also rest on the physical features of the place.”
Continued next week.
