Place Attachment Primer: Process
“What’s it like? Being back here after…how long has it been since you’ve been in?” Auggie Gleason, Jawbone Flats Caretaker asked me as we sat on the back porch of Cabin 4 on our first morning in camp.
We’d not been in Jawbone Flats, or near the Opal Creek Wilderness, since we came together with our dearest friends to watch the total solar eclipse of 2017. It’d been an unimaginable seven years.
I looked down at my hands as I considered Auggie’s question. What was it like to be back here?
In one hand, I held a cup of coffee. It felt good, so good, to be back in the Opal Creek watershed. We’d caught glimpses of the creek through the gathering dusk as we rode the last three miles into Jawbone with Auggie on the UTV the night before. It was every bit as translucent. Cabin 4 smelled exactly the same when we walked in the door. The creek’s music from the cabin sounded so sweet, so familiar.
In the years between our eclipse visit and the fire, Alex and I were both in new, demanding jobs. We’d just been married. We were building our home. Six hours’ driving distance yawned between Bainbridge Island and Jawbone Flats, an impossibility that felt temporal. We told ourselves, often and out loud, that Opal Creek would be there for us when we were done.
The Opal Creek Wilderness has been closed to the public since the 2020 Beachie Creek Fire leveled the forest and the 1920s era mining camp turned environmental education center at Jawbone Flats. The organization’s special use permit with the Forest Service allows them to access their private fifteen-acre inholding, and with this access they are cleaning up, researching, and preparing to rebuild. We’d come to help with this effort in exchange for access.
We’d met Auggie only once before, at a fundraising event for the organization we’d attended in the fall. Our encounter was brief, but the Jawbone magic was there instantly – a palpable experience of familiarity, a bones-deep understanding between stranger-kin.
“You’ve got to come in,” he invited. It was the invitation we were after and all the encouragement we needed to mount a months-long effort to accept.
And finally we were there, sitting on the back porch of Cabin 4. I came assuming I’d be hit by intermittent waves of grief and other overwhelming emotions. I imagined my memories enacted by specters dancing up and down main street. In retrospect, my expectations were there in my imagination. The reality was flat by comparison. It felt familiar, and familiar felt good. Or almost good. But it was wildly unfamiliar at the same time. More than anything, I felt disoriented.
Ironically, Cabin 4, the one residential cabin that survived the fire, is the one that has been threatened by the shifting channel of the North Fork of the Santiam River that runs behind it. Eventually, if Cabin 4 isn’t dismantled and removed from the site, it will slough off into the river.
In the hand opposite my coffee cup I held a joint. “It feels kinda like this,” I said finally in response to Auggie’s question. “Like having your uppers with your downers.”
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Process, the second component of researchers Robert Gifford and Leila Scannell’s three part definition of place attachment, is interested in how people become attached to place. What are the mechanisms of attachment? As is practice in other social-psychological conceptual frameworks, this question is answered in three parts: affect, cognition, and behavior.
“Humanistic geographers describe place belongingness in emotional [affective] terms,” write Gifford and Scannell in their 2009 paper “Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework.” By way of example they reference the emergence of the word “topophilia,” or love of place.
Affect’s relationship to place attachment is often observed in events of displacement. “Grief is not limited to the death of a loved one, but can emerge following the loss of an important place,” they write, “displacement results in feelings of sadness and longing.” They continue, “The desire to maintain closeness to a place is an attempt to experience the positive emotions that a place may evoke.”
If, as one researcher has concluded, “attachment is primarily based in affect,” then the role of cognition is to create the foundation for those positive emotions by way of experience.
“Place attachment as cognition involves the construction of, and bonding to, place meaning, as well as the cognitions [memories, beliefs, meanings, and knowledge] that facilitate closeness to a place,” Gifford and Scannell explain. “Fullilove (1996) views familiarity as the cognitive component of place attachment; to be attached is to know and organize the details of the environment.”
I wondered in Jawbone upon my post-fire return what it was, then, to be attached affectively and cognitively – to feel strong emotions and hold memories and meanings and knowledge – but simultaneously be suddenly and entirely unfamiliar with a place. Perhaps my brain was working so furiously to organize the details of the environment around me in its new iteration that I simply had no space for emotion.
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Proximity maintaining behavior is the most often cited behavioral outcome of place attachment. When you love a place, you stay there, or nearby, or you visit often, or as often as possible. The research indicates that periodic travel and even prolonged absence from places of attachment can have a positive effect on the person-place bond. It’s not that a place-attached person never leaves (which is often more an indicator of socio-economic status than place attachment), it’s that one always has the impulse to return again. An inborn homing beacon of sorts. A sense of when it’s been too long.
I’d been away too long. It had been too long already before the Beachie Creek Fire raged through Opal Creek. My own intrinsic homing signals called incessantly in the time we waited for access. But just being there wasn’t enough.
Auggie seemed to know that. He’s been bringing people into the new Opal Creek for three years now, watching their reactions.
“I like to have a project to do when we’re in there,” he told me over the phone in April when we first began planning our visit. “It helps people to process what they’re experiencing.”
We insisted on it, and Alex took no small pleasure in packing both chainsaws and pairs of chaps in preparation for volunteer glory in the burned old growth. He was thwarted by heat.
Continued next week.
