Place Attachment Primer: Place, part 2

Physical attachment is called rootedness and often includes a functional component of dependence. When a place provides something – recreation opportunities, education opportunities, rest, moments of epiphany, foraged foods, healing, new relationship incubation, medicinal plants – the relationship between person and place deepens. The place’s importance in this way can be symbolic and for that reason transferable to another place that symbolizes the same opportunities. But the research seems to want to distill attachment to symbolism in a way that Opal Creek defies. 

There wasn’t another complete watershed of old growth forest in Oregon. I don’t know this for a fact (and there’s surprisingly little understanding of exactly how much old growth remains in the US), but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn there isn’t another complete watershed of old growth forest in the states. The brief mention of a study done in Montana’s Rattlesnake Wilderness hints at the nuances between attachments made to a specific place (e.g. the Rattlesnake Wilderness, the Opal Creek Wilderness) and symbolic attachments made to categories of places (e.g. wilderness areas, temperate rainforests). “Those with greater place-focused attachment were less willing to substitute ‘their’ place for another,” the researchers found. Once a Boner, Always a Boner, reads the stickers and hats a friend made and distributed after the Beachie Creek Fire. 

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On our way out of Opal Creek on our last day we walked the 3.2 mile road we’d ridden in on with Auggie two nights before and worked on the previous day. I had walked this road dozens of times. When fourth and fifth graders from Salem and Portland and Eugene and Bend arrived at the gate, their introduction to outdoor school was walking this road. I knew the introductory hike curriculum well despite never having been an instructor. I knew each landmark by name, knew the stories, knew the stats. 

We crossed the Kopetski Bridge, named for the Oregon Representative who sponsored the Opal Creek protection bill in 1994. The bridge was singed but miraculously intact. We crossed it and hiked up the trail along the Little North Fork on the far side. 

The Forest Service has begun repairing the trails in preparation for reopening the area to visitors. This process happens in two parts: on the first pass through they clear the trail of blowdown; the second time through they repair the tread. They’d made their first pass on the first part of the Kopetski Trail. We marched up the trail to avoid entanglement in the blackberry thatch.

It was hot. The kind of day that, ten years ago, would’ve attracted hundreds of people to Opal Creek for the naturally conditioned under canopy of the oldest groves of trees and the shockingly cold water. We had it to ourselves, but there was no shade to be found. 

So we swam. And it wasn’t cold. One of the effects of the fire has been to raise the temperature of the creek from a year round average of forty-two degrees to something much more pleasant, though I don’t have a number to put to it. It was a grim pleasure though; cold, oxygen rich water provides habitat for amphibians and Opal Creek had always been famed for its “phib” diversity. One of the questions I walked out of the wilderness with that day is how the amphibians are doing now. I didn’t see any in my time there. 

We moved slowly through the Hewitt Grove. Named for Bertha Hewitt, one of the founders of Jawbone Flats, the story goes that when Bertha’s old man started eyeing the ancients in this stand for their lumber, she told him his sex life would end the moment he touched saw blade to trunk. We told the kids in outdoor school she threatened to never cook another meal for him again. Either way, Bertha has always been a personal hero of mine. We walked through her grove, necks craned. The stand of hundreds-of-years-old trees stood, erect as ever, but dead, dead, dead. Native blackberries clambered up their blackened trunks and we ate our fill. 

We passed the trailhead for Whetstone Mountain, crossed the Half Bridges for the last time, carefully hugging their inside curve, and crossed the Gold Creek Bridge, peering into its deadfall choked pool and the waterfall that fed it. We met up with Auggie, who’d spent the ninety plus degree morning performing routine maintenance on the used but newly acquired excavator our work the previous day had cleared the way for. 

It’s been hard to know how to feel since. Impossible, certainly, to name it. As soon as we passed through the last gate at the beginning of Forest Road 2207 and were locked out of Opal Creek again, we drove straight to Hood River to share our experience with some of our Opal Creek community gathered there. We felt as drawn to them as we had to the place, I noted, surprised. That draw has only grown since the fire, I noted too. 

Place attachment science is beautiful, truly. I have to be careful, though, to hold all these threads of research and facets of my experience together. It’s the whole expression of this place and what it’s meant to me and so many – its forests and its history of human habitation and reciprocity – that is so unique. The magic fades away when the relationship to it is teased apart into dualities and tripartite frameworks. It’s everything this place has provided – employment, Cabin 8 and all the memories it held, community, the Whetstone Mountain loop, the Perseid Meteor Shower on the helicopter pad, the cedars of Cedar Flats, the namesake of two little girls, daughters of my dear friends, and the brilliant yellow of the vine maple in the fall. 

“Perhaps the most important dimension of place attachment is the place itself,” Gifford and Scannell say by way of opening their section on the third and final component of their tripartite definition. Despite its importance though, there is relatively little discussion of place compared to people and means of attachment. “What is it about the place to which we connect?” They don’t seem to be able to name it, only ask the question. 

Which is maybe all I’m able to do, too. What was it about Opal Creek? What is it about Opal Creek? I don’t know, though I feel like I’ve been dancing at the edges of knowing. Like I’ve seen it in my peripheral vision, but when I try to focus on it, it dissipates, like the transpiration we used to watch rising off the treetops from Sacred Rock. What I do know is despite the devastation of the Beachie Creek Fire, my attachment to Opal Creek, and my attachment to my community, and my community’s attachment to Opal Creek, survives.