I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.

And thinking: maybe something will come, some shining coil of wind…

– Mary Oliver, lines from Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does it End?

“Is that…?”

Alex’s eyes jumped back and forth between the ribbon of road and the ribbon of sky above us. It was after ten o’clock and the last of the day’s light was still fading from the western edge of a clear sky.

But a haze had crept in, a subtle opacity laid overtop the otherwise clear, increasingly starry expanse. Our view was limited to a south-north band that followed the highway, hemmed in by fir trees, but as we watched, what at first seemed like light cloud cover began to organize itself into bands, as if someone had draped an impossibly sheer cloth over the dome of the sky.

I rolled down my window and leaned my head out to look straight up.

“Oh my god, Alex. That’s it.”

We were on the final twenty minute leg of the two-ish hour drive from our home on Bainbridge Island to where his parents live on Totten Inlet, west of Washington’s capital city of Olympia. We called them excitedly and chose our meeting spot.

We passed the turnoff to their house and continued to the end of the road. We parked just ahead of the two lane bridge that fed the tiny island at the opening of Totten Inlet. A group of people – including a cadre of teenagers in formal attire – were already gathered on the bridge, gawking at the spectacle stretching out overhead.

A knot of color – pale green, blue, purple – formed above our heads. The colors swirled, and the rays emanating from the knot fell around us in streamers. A coronal aurora, I have since learned, formed when parallel streams of charged particles being funneled to the earth’s magnetic poles converged. A celestial confluence, the merging of cosmic rivers.

The conditions, we’d heard that morning, were ideal for spotting the aurora borealis, the northern lights. If the sky remained clear they would be visible, even at this southerly latitude, such was the magnitude of the solar storm creating the event. We’d had our eyes fixed on the sky our whole drive, wishing the day away to see what the darkness would reveal.

We huddled on the bridge – Alex, his parents Barb and Fritz, our dog Maple – turning in circles, heads thrown back at impossible angles. We bandied “wows” and “whoas” between us in a verbal game of hot potato. We felt impossibly lucky.

A gangly teen in dapper attire topped with a mop of unruly hair wheeled on his friends, and, grabbing one of them by the shoulders, exclaimed, “It’s green! It’s blue! It’s purple! It’s red! Oh my god, it’s a friggin’ rainbow in the sky! Oh my god! Oh my god!”

I laughed out loud, I couldn’t help myself. I don’t know what compelled him to put words to the moment, but they felt so hilariously inadequate next to the phenomenon, despite their accuracy. But what else was there to say?

The display stretched out before us, climbing on pillars of light that morphed from green to fushia. It lit up every horizon we could see, from the west through the north to the east and overhead.

A photographer, equipped with a respectable looking lens and a tripod, asked us if we wanted to see his images. I pretended at politeness without dropping my gaze from the sky overhead. “It’s really not fair that this is our impression of the aurora,” he said, matter-of-factly, as he advanced through his own images of moments just passed, too quickly for anyone watching to actually see. “This is why people are disappointed when they see the northern lights. The cameras make it look like more than it is.”

Our iPhone cameras did the same for us, capturing three seconds worth of light instead of using the light available in real time, as our eyes do. Still, it hadn’t occurred to me to be disappointed. People are disappointed when they see the northern lights? I frowned at the thought in the darkness and moved away.

All I felt was awe as I stood on the bridge, and walked its length with my family, and stood again. We were there for over an hour, maybe close to two. We then took up watch from my in-laws’ home until the sky resumed its normal midnight hue. We finally tucked ourselves into bed in the wee hours.

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Aurora borealis occur when storms on the surface of the sun send waves of energized particles hurtling toward earth on solar winds at speeds of, in the case of this recent event, three million miles per hour. These energized particles slam into the earth’s magnetic field, which shunts them toward the magnetic poles where their collision with atmospheric gasses releases energy in the form of photons, light.

May’s solar storm produced multiple X class flares – the strongest of the rating system – and “coronal mass ejections” whose emissions resulted in one of the strongest geomagnetic storms on scientific record in decades. Some are conjecturing this storm was of a magnitude – both in terms of its strength and far-reaching visibility – that hasn’t been seen in five hundred years.

Where does earth begin? Where does it end? While to an extent I’ve consciously known otherwise, my brain habitually reduces the earth to its crust – the bit to which I’m gravitationally bound, the bit that I can see. Maybe the heavenward orientation of my childhood left me with a crick in my neck, because my attention, my prayers, have since been earthbound. But the aurora made visible to me earth’s outer reaches, its magnetic field, as far as 250 miles beyond the crust where I stood. I can no longer point down to earth, up to not-earth.

The more like this I learn, the more the awe that I felt the night of May 10th grows. “Awe is really about vast things that transcend your understanding of the world which you need to accommodate to your understanding of reality,” says researcher and author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life Dacher Keltner in an interview with Behavioral Scientist. I’ve had some reconceptualizing work to do as a result of this experience and my subsequent learning – my brain demanded it.

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Where do I begin? Where do I end? In coincidence’s beautiful way, awe has a similar effect on notions of self that the aurora had on my notions of earth. Keltner notes, “New studies of the default mode network, which is where self-representation takes place, show that awe reduces activation in those chunks of the cortex…It’s really that the self is quiet.”

There were maybe a hundred people milling around Steamboat Island bridge under the May 10th aurora and it felt – for the reverential hush, for the sense of an audience with the divine – like being in church. In such quiet is connection: “You start to realize, I’m not a separate person, I’m connected to all these people,” continues Keltner. “If you’re looking for change, [awe is] a good emotion to seek.”

Here, in the convergence of auroral epiphanies, I’m left holding a question in Mary Oliver’s singular words: “Where does the temple begin? Where does it end?” I feel newly atune to the impossible magic of the earth, with its molten core and magnetic aura that defend us from solar onslaught. Of the interaction of earth with the sun’s violent outbursts, where they meet in the stratified thresholds of the ionosphere, casting off greens and reds and blues and purples in the swan songs of their collisions: shining coils of wind. Of the ribbons and coronas that formed over our heads on May 10th, making visible the velocity of the solar debris and earth’s movement through space.

Here, in the afterglow of awe, I feel changed. I feel an expanded sense of my place in physical terms, one that extends beyond geography right up to the edges of space. I feel newly akin to anyone who could stand in the sublime of the aurora, as though with arms open, silently or shouting, “Oh my god! Oh my god!”

I trace the origins of my fluency in nature to my dad. My sisters and I call him Papa, and it’s his birthday today. While I hadn’t imagined writing specifically about anyone in my family for this project, he’s just been on my mind. As I think and write about the things I think and write about, his influence on me – the person who grew up to take on a project examining her own connection to nature – is ever present.

When I was too young to remember it, my maternal grandparents bought a little mid-century rambler in the Southwest Michigan woods, a short walk from the lakeshore. When my family would visit, as we loved to do, we slipped into a blissful, naturally inspired rhythm.

Papa would wake me early in the morning when we were there, when the first light appeared in the sky and the birds began singing. He’d steal into the bunkbed room where my sisters and cousins and I were filed away and gently wake me. I’d slip out of bed and follow him out of the house.

Sometimes we crept through the private beach club across the street from us, noiselessly as the morning deer, until we passed the last tucked away cabin and emerged from the wooded trail to the top of the sand dunes that sloped away to the shore. Sometimes we got in the minivan and headed to Cherry, or Chikaming, or Weko, or Warren Dunes, or beaches farther north. Our favorites changed by the season and conditions, and one of Papa’s talents of precision was choosing a beach particularly suited to the morning.

Upon arrival, he’d lay down in the sand and I would curl up next to him, my gangly legs folded under the warmth of my sweatshirt, my head on his chest. He would then open a large, leatherbound Bible and read aloud from the book of Proverbs. There are thirty-one chapters in Proverbs, each with about as many verses, each verse of two lines – King Solomon’s poetic treatise on how to live. Papa read a chapter of Proverbs aloud every day of every month for years and years. And when we were in Michigan, he read them aloud to me on the beach.

I remember feeling embarrassed when other early-morning beach goers would eye his Bible and hear his voice – which didn’t change in resonance or timber when others were in earshot – reading the ancient poetry. But that didn’t happen too often, and no one was ever unkind. The even stronger memory is of hearing the sound of Papa’s voice reverberating from the inside of his chest, mixing with the rhythm of his heartbeat, mixing with the roar of the waves.

What I couldn’t have named then was that my dad was coming to this beach to take care of himself. This was how he calmed himself at the beginning of the day – he down-regulated his nervous system with the rhythmic application of his voice to King Solomon’s poetry and the energy of the waves. Unconsciously, I in turn was regulating my nervous system with his.

Not only was he modeling nervous system regulation in nature for me, but he was also making himself a safe person to be regulated with, to be around. This gift, wordlessly given, has continued giving throughout my life.

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Papa had a photo album of his adventures before the church (which we never called church – let’s call it “non-church”) and my mom and us girls. In it were photos of him and a couple of friends in the prime of their lives, each wearing bulging backpacks, grinning against gorgeous peaked and lake-studded landscapes of the American West. From time to time my sisters and I would pull out this particular album to wonder at the younger version of our dad and ask him to tell us the stories held in each sepia-toned image.

He’d tell us of catching lake trout in the backcountry of Glacier National Park and frying them with eggs in a cast iron skillet he’d hiked in, dangling from his external frame pack. He’d tell us of falling asleep under the stars and waking up in the first light of morning with a snake curled up in his sleeping bag with him for warmth. He’d tell us of the starriness of the night sky on a new moon, the milkiness of the Milky Way. Or of coming face to face with a bull moose. Or how he and his buddies would be out for days without seeing another person. He planted seeds in each of his three daughters and plenty of other non-church youth. Then he nurtured them.

At a time when this non-church was tightening its controls on everything, my dad increasingly found ways to weave nature into our otherwise highly controlled existence. He took up rock climbing when I was in middle school, and got us into it, too. He taught us rope skills and, on the rare free night, facilitated non-church-sanctioned youth get togethers at the first rock gym in the region – converted grain silos an hour’s drive from where we lived.

With these skills, he began organizing an annual camping retreat for the non-church’s high school youth from across the state. It was neither mandatory nor discouraged, a sweet spot of freedom for us. Each spring about 60 non-church youth and a comparatively small handful of adults would descend on the state parks and national forests of Southern Illinois to spend a few days climbing, orienteering, and hiking.

He bought me my first backpack at about the same time, and the two of us went on our first backpacking trip together – a couple days on the River to River Trail in the Shawnee National Forest. He told me that as a young construction laborer he got laid off a lot, and each time he’d pack up his backpack and head west. He’d stay out until he got word that there was a crew or a job that needed him, then he’d reluctantly head home again.

We didn’t go on many backpacking trips together, maybe three or four total over the years, but they were enough of a taste for me to have since continued on to backpack more and farther than my dad ever could with a family and a non-church and all they demanded of him. These experiences were enough of a respite that I learned – wordlessly for the most part, as is my dad’s way – how to replenish my soul in nature, and where to look for peace when all else failed.

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I once heard John O’Donohue say in an interview that his father was the holiest man he knew. He qualified this by saying his father had a way of “slipping into the present,” entirely undivided. I thought of Papa, and felt the same. He no longer attends non-church, nor church, for that matter. He no longer reads aloud from Proverbs each morning. But still.

I thought of a morning when I was very young, when he woke my sisters and me in the predawn of an autumn day and drove us to a nature preserve at the edge of town. We walked wordlessly and as silently as we could through fallen oak and sycamore leaves to a streambed. We laid down on our bellies in tall grass, our chins resting on our forearms, and we waited. Soon three deer emerged from the woods, announced by the sound of their hooves on rustling leaves just before we saw them. They moved cautiously to the water where they drank in turns. They eased. They drank their fill. We remained silent and still and breathless. They gently wandered off. We drank in the air we’d denied ourselves to prolong their visitation.

There are dozens of stories like this I could tell. Dozens more I’ve forgotten, I’m sure.

Papa, my inclination to turn to nature – for answers, for guidance, for solace, for a sense of who I am, for a sense of being okay, for a source of delight – came wordlessly from you. Grateful is not a big enough word. But thank you, Papa, inadequate as that feels. Happy birthday.

Note: The publicity image sheet compiled by the Whitney Museum of American Art for the purposes of promoting Memory Map is the most comprehensive (though entirely unordered) source of the works referenced below. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s website has a much higher resolution archive, but it also is not comprehensive, works are unlabeled until opened, and unlinkable when opened. Some works I’ve linked to directly; in most instances that wasn’t possible.

My work comes right from a visceral place — deep, deep — as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take these feelings and attach them to the passerby? To my dying breath, and my last tube of burnt sienna, I will try.

– Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

In pheasant feather hands, the Mother holds God is Red by Native philosopher and theologian Vine Deloria Jr.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, the artist who created her, nestled the book in her lap, where — in the Christian version of this scene — sits the baby Jesus. An opening over the Mother’s heart reveals an ear of blue corn. She wears moccasins on her feet and buckskin leggings over-wrapped in an American flag. Wood and turquoise beads and a shining abalone shell hang around her neck. Thick black cloth braids frame a framed face. Her baby, their face also framed, is worn in a pack on her back.

The piece’s dimensionality — both literal and figurative — forced me to examine it from every angle. I’m embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith or seen any of her work prior to first visiting Memory Map at the Seattle Art Museum a month before it closed. Whether that is demonstrative of a failure on the part of the custodians of the canon of art, my education, or my own depleted attention span in my last semester of college when I took both Contemporary Art and Women in Art & Society, I truly don’t know. But what a gift to come across her work now, in the middle of life.

A citizen of The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Smith’s work has palpable presence. I felt this immediately upon entering the exhibit where sat Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974. Not a hint of posturing, the Mother’s seated position suggested a power foundationed with ease, with self-knowledge. She commanded respect.

It was the perfect opener to the exhibit — an experiential palette stimulator that invited me into a reverent mood prepared to follow her map, wherever it led. This mood, and Indian Madonna Enthroned has stayed with me since. I’ve steeped myself in Smith’s work, listened to her speak, and revisited her art, curation, and activism, listening for her to name the truths she paints so beautifully on canvas.

If the outpouring of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s five-decade career can be taken in whole as a Memory Map, as the title of the recent retrospective exhibition of her art suggests, to what memory do these maps point?

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An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is your mother’s blood…

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing.

–lines from A Map to the Next World by Joy Harjo

The memories that begged expression in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work were next rendered in pastel and charcoal in her early maps. In Wallowa Waterhole Series: Spring Tracks, 1979, colorful green planes are intersected with solid, dashed, and printed lines in contrasting colors suggesting not only movement across land but the tracking, the witnessing of that movement. Two pictograph-like horses leap from one side of the map to the other.

“Smith’s belief that the ‘landscape is never static’ underlies the often subtle but ever-present resistance to colonial narratives of land use in her work,” writes Laura Phipps, curator of Memory Map, in her accompanying essay, “My Roots Extend: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and the Landscape of Memory.” The land is foundational to everything. It was never empty, far from trackless, as the fever dream of Manifest Destiny claimed. It’s difficult to tell whether Smith felt compelled to relay this message, and the style of her early maps emerged from it, or if the message was there in her, waiting for expression, the result of an immersion in process and the sense of place inherent in her being.

As Smith’s career progressed, she honed and built upon that foundational message of the land’s primacy and Native peoples' forever presence. In the Chief Seattle series, created 1989-1991, Smith used her canvases to indict American environmental atrocities and rampant resource extraction. In the triptych that is The Spotted Owl (C.S. 1854), 1990, Smith painted a wooded scene eerily void of both the work’s namesake and the old-growth trees upon which they are dependent. Embedded atop the right and left panels are a pair of shining splitting mauls by way of explanation. A bronze plaque at the bottom of the central panel reads C.S. – 1854, a reference to the year the Duwamish and Suquamish chief signed the Treaty of Point Elliott thereby ceding their homelands to the United States government.

A speech made by Chief Seattle to mark the signing of the treaty is excerpted in a number of other paintings in this series. In Sunlit (C.S. 1854), 1989, the words, “The air is precious, for all things share the same breath, the animals, the plants, the humans,” are scrawled under an illuminated light bulb that casts weak light upwards in rays that extend off the canvas onto the gallery wall. If the heavy brushwork and somber palette are indicative of the air quality the quote addresses, the whole piece echoes with the unheeded words of Chief Seattle. On the facing wall is the 1989 painting of the same series, Pictures at an Exhibition (C.S. 1854), in which the quoted lines, “Whatever befalls the earth befalls the inhabitants of the earth,” are fit between framed, crushed aluminum cans atop an oily soup of thick paint. “Smith’s work clearly links the exploitation of the land to the blatant disregard of treaties made between the U.S. government and Native nations,” reads nearby gallery signage.

But there was another level of clarity Smith’s work was building toward, catalyzed by the 1992 quincentennial of Columbus’ arrival in America.

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I was thinking how can I make my messages not so incommunicado? How could I make them so that people would understand more about what I am saying? Because I really felt like I had something to say, to communicate, but I wasn’t doing it right.

– Jaune Quick-to-See Smith on the impetus for her map series that began in 1992

The power of maps lies not merely in their accuracy or their correspondence with reality. It lies in their having incorporated a set of conventions that make them combinable in one central place, enabling the accumulation of both power and knowledge at that center.

– David Turnbull, Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas

Where Smith’s first maps quietly depicted Native inhabitation, her 1992 painting Indian Map opted for a louder message. It was the first in her on-going series of paintings of the geo-political (and highly recognizable) American land mass, altered in one way or another. In this her first, states lines are blurred and have the appearance of receding. Collaged across the map are newspaper clippings, both of images and words, that acknowledge the first inhabitants of the American land mass and indict the colonization of Native lands and the genocide and erasure of Native peoples, “From Sea to Shining Sea,” as one clipping announces.

“There was opportunity for a more incisive reading of Native American history as the year 1992 approached,” Phipps writes. The quincentennial, “proved to be a catalyst for many artists reacting to and redirecting this long-skewed historical narrative.” Smith’s maps engaged in the work of correcting those narratives.

Six of Smith’s maps of this series were included in Memory Map, the most recent of which were completed in 2021. They hung together in a single gallery, offering the visitor view upon view of this country through Smith’s eyes. In Memory Map, 2000, pictographs overlay the map, which is obscured, as if by thin gauze. The iconography is reminiscent of some of the inclusions in Smith’s earliest maps, her signs of human habitation. Here they are given the place of priority, they are the representations of the stories of the land. The arbitrariness of state delineations fade behind their presence.

In Survival Map, 2021, Smith rotates the American landmass 90 degrees until the west coast occupies the top of the canvas. Quite suddenly, the power of the shape is stripped. “That North is traditionally ‘up’ on maps is the result of a historical process, closely connected with the global rise and economic dominance of northern Europe,” writes Maps are Territories author, David Turnbull. By rotating her canvas, Smith refuses to accede that dominance.

With this simple reorientation, Smith stepped fully into her artistic voice. The inclusion of Native Plateau inspired patterning around the American landmass further subverts the presumptive power of America, particularly when seen as replacements for the two major fields of the American flag. Smith felt the power of her own work in this instance, “embodied by Indigeneity,” and “too disorienting and subversive for viewers to initially comprehend,” in the words of curator Laura Phipps. In the center of the painting, also rotated by 90 degrees, is the punchline:

NDN humor

Causes people

To survive.

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I like to say that my DNA comes out of that land, because that’s where I was born and it comes into the mother’s bloodstream through the food. And in that food is the DNA of, you know, of weasels, and woodticks, and bluejays, and you name it, it’s all there. You figure thousands and thousands of years of our crumbling bodies merging with the earth and then coming back to feed the mother — so that’s what’s in me.

– Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

I love art. I love its challenge, its commentary on culture and what it means to be human. I found art as a lens on culture so compelling I majored in art history. And still, I can count on a single hand the number of times art has moved me to tears, touched me with truth so deeply that I felt changed by it. Those experiences — the ones in which something essential is witnessed and recognized, in which an entirely new depth of understanding is accessed — have been few.

For me, the capstone of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map was another of Smith’s 2021 maps. It hung in the final gallery, also rotated by 90 degrees, with all the destabilization of power implied. A framed portrait of an unidentified Indigenous woman hung separately above the map, recognized as such by her beautiful clothing and headdress. Below her, the reoriented American landmass is surrounded by blue, the states are delineated and painted with dripping tones of orange, turquoise, gold, and green. Layered over the states are translations for Mother Earth in sixteen different, named languages (none of them English): Mattarahkka, Saami; Ka-luahine, Hawaiian; Madre Terra, Italian; Akna, Maya; Tatei Yurianaka, Huichol, to name a few. At the bottom, Smith names the piece: Map to Heaven.

From Indian Madonna Enthroned to Map to Heaven, Smith’s message, the memory she was pointing me to all along, came through: we’ve forgotten our Mother — our origins, the land, the quality of care we are called to in our relationships with all of life, the quality of care with which we are Mothered by the Earth. But she is the way forward, it is with her guidance and her wisdom we are to proceed. We are the land, and it is us. We need to live out that memory on the land. We need to remember our Mother.

The knowledge exists. The way forward exists. The teachers are here, they’ve always been here. (Smith’s Going Forward, Looking Back, 1996, comes to mind.) It requires a reorientation though — a forgetting of the patriarchal habits of line drawing and maximum resource extraction and militarism. It requires acknowledgement and righting of wrongs. It requires a willingness to be led by the Mother, and by those whose relationship with her is intact, those who have carried this land in their bodies the longest.

“My work comes right from a visceral place — deep, deep — as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take these feelings and attach them to the passerby?” Smith named her artistic vocation. As a passerby in the third floor galleries of the Seattle Art Museum, considering the work of this visionary woman, twice, I am changed.

From my home today, on the lands ceded by Chief Seattle and the Suquamish People, on Mother’s Day, I am ready to remember, to extend roots beyond the soles of my feet into these sacred soils.

On our land grows a hawthorn tree on the lone sunny slope of an otherwise heavily treed acre. When we first began carving our home from this land, I wanted to plant fruit trees—an Asian pear, an apple, a sour plum—in this spot.

Cutting down trees is a grave business, but while building here I had to level a certain amount of pragmatism against my inherent disinclination. But this hawthorn—not yet shoulder height and growing dead center of my precious sunny patch—I felt reticent to touch. Something, somewhere along the way, whispered into my consciousness the warning that cutting down a hawthorn tree is bad luck.

As a child I possessed an enchanted sensibility. I remember elbowing my way through a pair of fur coats hanging in the moth-ball scented basement closet of my grandparents’ Chicagoland rowhouse, listening for the crunch of snow underfoot, searching the back wall in the darkness for the warm glow of a lamp post and the smiling welcome of Mr. Tumnus. I was hopeful Narnia could be accessed through this wardrobe analog.

“As we ‘grow up,’ we get sophisticated out of enchantment and become too smart about the things that cause children to wonder,” writes Thomas Moore in The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life. I arrived here by way of disappointment. I never broke through to Narnia. I looked for magic everywhere but found it nowhere and eventually decided I would be nobody’s fool and gave it all up as childish.

As an adult, I’m re-awakening to an enchanted world. The nineteen-year-old me—the skeptic, the pragmatist, the atheist—would cringe at the woman twice her age who prays in her own way, who believes in things she can’t see, who heeds with all seriousness a vague premonition about cutting down a hawthorn.

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My friend Heather Wolf also dwells in an enchanted world and has made a lifelong study of plants and ancient botanical brewing practices. A fountain of knowledge on medicinal plants and their folklore specifically, she incorporates many of them into her small-batch crafted botanical elixirs.

One of my favorite of Heather’s herbal concoctions features hawthorn. Knowing the importance she places on each plant featured in her brews, I knew Heather would know what lay behind my inkling concerning this tree. I asked her where I got this vague notion that I shouldn’t cut down my hawthorn.

“They say that fairies live in hawthorn trees and like to have their fairy trysts in their roots. Ooooo!” she replied. “They say that if you cut a hawthorn tree the fairies will curse you, so if you absolutely must cut one, you should first speak with the fairies, make offerings, and perhaps plant another haw in a suitable location.” In other words, she said, “Hawthorns are powerful magic.”

While Fiona Stafford, professor of English at Oxford and author of The Long, Long Lives of Trees, says nothing of fairy trysts in her chapter on hawthorn, she explores their magical lore: pots of gold, child-snatching fairies, and specific trees—at the center of centuries old strife between spiritual traditions—axed and nursed to life again by the anonymous faithful on opposing sides.

Stafford notes how the hawthorn was celebrated across ancient European cultures. Hawthorn blooms around Beltane, the beginning of May, a thin time according to pagan spirituality. Their berries, or haws, ripen near Samhain—Halloween, Beltane’s annual counterpoint, also a thin time, according to many world traditions.

Known also as the May tree with an eponymous holiday and month, the hawthorn’s blooms were central to many traditional May Day celebrations as omens of fertility and abundance. The May Queen was bedecked in them; homes were decorated with them; their musky scent was said to smell of sex.

In her beautiful philosophical treatise on garden design, The Garden Awakening, Irish author and landscape designer Mary Reynolds briefly visits hawthorn in her exploration of building wishing and praying spaces into gardens. She writes of a pre-Celtic race, the Tuatha Dé Dannan, who tied their prayers and wishes in the forms of small bits of cloth rags to hawthorns growing on fairy mounds. They believed that so long as the rag remained tied to the bough the intention of the prayer or wish was held by the tree.

Do I believe malevolent fairies are swinging from the pliant boughs of this sapling, ready to curse me should I cut this tree down? No, not at all. But a nod toward the pagan belief system that doubtlessly formed the spiritual foundation for many of my ancestors feels appropriate. Not to mention, I feel my soul’s “absolute, unforgiving need for regular excursions into enchantment,” as Thomas Moore names it. Whether there is anything here that the seven-year-old me would qualify as magic, something in me tingles as I reach backwards through centuries for a considered course of action where this little tree is concerned.

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Heather didn’t stop at haw lore though, and it’s what she said next that most intrigued me. “Hawthorn is one of the most important trees and medicines to me, personally. She aids in courage and a strong, healthy heart, physically and emotionally.”

Hawthorn has been used in traditional medicine as a heart tonic for centuries and increasingly its heart-fortifying credentials are capturing the attention of western medicine. The New York City based medical conglomerate Mt. Sinai has a web-page devoted to the health benefits of hawthorn. In medicinal use since the first century, American doctors began using hawthorn to treat circulatory and respiratory illnesses in the early nineteenth century.

Currently, research into the health benefits of hawthorn focuses on its array of antioxidants and their ability to stave off free radicals attacking the heart. “Hawthorn has been studied in people with heart failure,” notes the webpage. “A number of studies conclude that hawthorn significantly improved heart function.”

Heather echoed this: “Hawthorn is heart tonifying. She’s effective at treating hypo- and hypertensive cardiac states. And she’s effective at treating the physical and emotional heart. Whatever medicine your heart needs.”

I’d never thought of my heart as being particularly vulnerable ahead of this conversation, but then I considered my grandfather’s fatal heart failure as a shadow I might encounter one day, and I began to see my heart’s need for fortification in its physical form.

I’m particularly interested in the way this plant is good for both the physical and emotional heart, though. I’m amazed at how the heart, conceived of as a single organ with an outsized task—keeping us alive—has this energetic shadow-puppet that holds emotions such as the courage Heather named. If the opposite of feeling courageous is feeling discouraged, I begin to see my heart’s need for fortification in its emotional form, too. I could use this medicine.

There is magic in a plant’s ability to heal an animal’s heart in such a holistic way—powerful magic, indeed.

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In these first days of May my hawthorn’s new growth has unfurled its shapes against the sky: small, intricately lobed leaves in the most quintessential spring green. If chlorophyll has an exact hue, this is it. As yet, there are no buds in sight. This tree has yet to bloom and I don’t know which year will be its first.

An evergreen huckleberry protects the young tree, its new growth flares vivid orange and red, and its clusters of tiny pink-white flowers are just beginning to open. The industrious hum of honey bees plying the few open blossoms they can find lays a melody atop the percussion of the rain.

I’ve always thought of superstition as the counterweight to reason, as opposite from fact as fiction. The word actually comes from the old French by way of Latin. Super- or “over,” and stare, “to stand.” To stand over, “as in awe,” notes Oxford Languages.

Something—call it a curmudgeonly fairy if you like—kept me from cutting this tree down long enough for me to uncover a truly enchanting idea. A few years ago, when I first opened Mary Reynolds’ book, I was struck by a paragraph on nourishment that concluded, “If your bare skin makes contact with the earth as you walk or work, the land will have a better chance to know what you need through the intimacy of skin on skin.”

In my own way I’ve done this, sought intimacy with this land, walked it with bare feet, weeded it with bare hands, tended, cared, coaxed. Wordless prayers have streamed from my fingers and toes, finding their grounding in the earth. The very earth that some time before we started calling her ours, or us hers, began growing this hawthorn tree in just the right, sunny spot.

It strikes me as nothing short of magic that this request to be cared for by this land for which I care in turn was answered before I asked in the form of a tree that will nourish my heart against hereditary weakness and discouragement alike. That this tree, holding heart medicine in its leaves and someday its flowers, happens to grow on the land I now happen to live on, on which I have no ancestral lineage, no roots beyond those established less than a decade ago, astounds me.

And so I stand over the hawthorn, in the awe-struck sense of the word superstition, in the cold rain of spring, whispering my thanks to my place.

Earth Day, established in 1970, draws nearly a billion people from across the world to celebratory events annually. I remember when this annual observance first registered with me as a fourth grader. Earth Day delighted the ten-year-old me. It appealed to my sense of goodness, my love of nature, my hunger for celebration.

Today though, one day set aside out of 365 (366 this year) to acknowledge both what I receive and what I owe the Earth feels far from adequate. Similarly, calling myself a steward and my sense of duty to place stewardship feels…off.

I am fed, watered, and oxygenated by the earth. I am sheltered and clothed by the earth. I am healed by the earth. We all are. This isn’t an expression of my faith or my sense of spirituality or even hyperbolic language stretching reality—this is fact. When I consider this, and then consider that the earth’s primacy in our collective lives has been whittled down to one token day a year where we show up and plant a tree or a packet of wildflower seeds, paint our faces like some soon-to-be-extinct, charismatic megafauna, buy a stainless steel straw, and think of ourselves as good…I am disappointed in myself, in us.

When I consider that to steward means to oversee the affairs of the household of another, I am discouraged by the self-othering language we use and how it fails to convey the relationships at the very foundation of our existence. I am discouraged that our collective sense of calling as named in our land ethics continues to position us above and not amongst life.

What language points toward something that feels both truer and more hopeful? What actions might that language inspire?

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When I search the lexicon for a linguistic reorientation, the concept of ecosystem engineer immediately offers itself. A 1994 Oikos journal article, “Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers” defines the concept:

Ecosystem engineers are organisms that directly or indirectly modulate the availability of resources to other species, by causing physical state changes in biotic or abiotic materials. In so doing they modify, maintain and create habitats. Autogenic engineers (e.g. corals, or trees) change the environment via their own physical structures (i.e. their living and dead tissues). Allogenic engineers (e.g. woodpeckers, beavers) change the environment by transforming living or non-living materials from one physical state to another, via mechanical or other means…Organisms act as engineers when they modulate the supply of a resource or resources other than themselves.

It goes on to note that effects are greatest where “species with large per capita impacts, living at high densities, over large areas for a long time, [give] rise to structures that persist for millennia and that modulate many resource flows.” Humans, of course, do this. Given our density, coverage, and persistence, we now have an epoch named for the alterations we’ve made to the earth—the Anthropocene.

The ecosystem engineer’s task is to meet their needs in a way that benefits the individual and is beneficial in its effects on the whole in both the short and long term. Any action that is extractive or otherwise misaligned will eventually play out as environmental decline, ultimately threatening the existence of the engineer by way of degrading the engineered landscape. The health of the individual is synonymous with the health of the environment, and the long game is important. It’s an orientation that leaves no room for a “this earth is not my home” mentality.

Humans have a poor track record as ecosystem engineers. But it is possible—and demonstrated across the animal kingdom, including among humans—to modulate the supply of resources to the extent of shaping the very land, as engineers do, without living beyond the land’s capacity.

When I consider myself a part of the ecosystem in which I live, I can see clearly that my wellness is limited by the wellness of my place. And further that the healthier my place is, the more capacity for wellness I have. When I begin to consider that my health extends beyond the confines of my body, a whole new sense of urgency arises, a whole new kind of obligation. The work of restoration becomes both activism and the work of self care.

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“The single most effective method of managing noxious weeds is to prevent establishment. The success of this method will depend on public education on ecology of weeds, their spread, and their impacts to biodiversity and wildlife habitat,” reads BI Parks vegetative management plan.

What these management plans hint at but don’t quite spell out is that the bridge from education to action then must be crossed by that public. The public must be empowered to be a part of the solution—success of this method will depend on public education and engagement. Being able to walk around accurately identifying invasive weeds is not a solution. Pulling them is, and feeling not only permission to engage in public lands in beneficial ways, but obligation. And not just on Earth Day. And not just in sanctioned work parties. But every day, on public and private lands, by all of us. And not just pulling invasive weeds, but planting native and naturalized plants in their place, and picking up trash, and thinning overcrowded forests increasingly threatened by wildfire.

I don’t know what to make of my brain. I can’t deny that humans have a capacity that is unparalleled in the rest of life’s expressions. I don’t know how to reconcile this with my longing to remember my nature. That said, I think it’s fair to surmise that our brains have evolved faster than our instinct to use them judiciously, but one lesson from my Christian childhood I’ve decided to keep is that to whom much is given, from him will much be required. The capacity of our brains comes with enormous ramifications for the earth, and now we must meet that enormity with an equally outsized response as ecosystem engineers.

I feel compelled to get to work. I feel compelled to replace language like stewardship in an effort to remember that my fate is not held in different hands than that of the rest of life. My job on earth is not to manage it for God. I imagine a steward and an ecosystem engineer would behave differently in the same environment—one aspires to please an absentee landlord and eventually matriculate to heaven, one calls earth home. I feel compelled to find regular and meaningful ways to improve my home place, and that same compulsion extends beyond the little square of property I legally own to really any place in which I find myself, in which I want to be well.

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It’s a long game we’re developing here and the amount of work to be done is daunting. But it’s also necessary, and rewarding, and possible. The property and the woods beyond them in which we will soon be sanctioned “park stewards” need us in these roles. It’s been a delight to come to understand that the earth is not better off without us—especially not with the havoc we’ve wreaked—it needs us.

With the complete understanding the work will never be done, it’s been powerful to watch the land around our home recover good health. It will take more than the small handful of people currently caring for Gazzam Lake to see similar improvements there, but it’s been a solace to drop to my knees in the dirt—whether on the slope of our home hillside, or trailside in Gazzam Lake, or roadside between here and there—and commit some small but deliberate act of restorative care. It’s become a go to in the face of despair, in the grips of anxiety about the state of the world.

Alex has spent the last few weeks clearing the ravine of deadfall and limbing up its trees as part of a neighborhood-wide effort at improving our fire safety. While he’s labored at that, I’ve pruned leggy huckleberries in the understory too shaded to have a shot at fruiting. I’ve begun pulling this year’s round of invasive blackberry from the perimeter of our meadow—an annual, seasonal-long endeavor. I’ve sown spotted beebalm on the sunny hillock cupping the firepit. I’ve sown a packet of wildflower seeds Alex picked up at an Earth Day event into a sparse patch in the meadow, laughing.

What do I owe the earth? How do I go about giving what I owe? This pair of questions has followed me around for a few weeks now as I’ve thought about Earth Day and considered the vitality of the land on which we built our home and live. 

The sun has been shining intermittently each day for about a week and the spring growth is on. There’s not a bare scrap of soil anywhere save the brand new layer of mulch Alex has just added around our picnic table and firepit. Even that will be covered with growing things in another month, such is spring’s insistence. 

Five years ago, Alex and I bought a little less than an acre of land on the south end of Bainbridge Island. We began building our home, a 720 square foot living space perched above a woodworking and ceramic studio of the same footprint, in 2019. In January of 2021, we moved in. 

A building site had been cleared by the original developers of our lane more than twenty years prior to our purchase. It turned into a thicket of invasive blackberry and forearm-stout Scotch broom in the intervening years, and our very first endeavor on the land was to remove this towering bramble with chainsaws. The root wads had to be dug out with an excavator. When we finished this task what remained was hard packed, weed seed infested, and depleted soil. We scraped it back to hardpan and started over.

A friend pointed me to the work of “reformed landscape architect” Mary Reynolds who is passionately calling all who will hear to “build an ark!” The first step of rewilding land, according to Reynolds’ non-profit We Are the Ark, is to sow native, organic wildflower seed everywhere you might have or be inclined to grow a resource intensive monocrop like a green grass lawn. Let it go, mowing only necessary footpaths and removing only noxious weeds. Slowly the succession of species is underway. 

Trees will sprout up. Leave them if you can, says Reynolds. Most of the earth wants to become forest. She insists there is no room for chemicals in a natural environment, that building healthy soil is paramount and that begins with only beneficial inputs. This is the work of habitat restoration, and, Reynolds urges, our own yards and gardens, however small, are the places to start. 

Reynolds’ philosophy of land care immediately resonated with me. We trucked in loads of top soil that we spread in thick layers across the hardpan. We discovered Northwest Meadowscapes, a Port Townsend, Washington based native grass and flower seed company. We covered all the new soil with two different seed mixes that together combine dozens of native flowers and grasses. 

In the few intervening years we’ve watched a meadow grow up around our house. We’ve welcomed butterflies and pollinators neither of us have seen in decades, watched them dance over blooms that are new to me despite having been common here at one time—meadowfoam, popcorn flower, gentian, tarweed. We’ve watched a succession of blooms that are familiar and at home in a riot of other life—coreopsis, buttercup, yarrow, primrose, half a dozen varieties of clover. 

It’s a delight to see how much life this small slope and side garden—the total area approaches 3,000 square feet—supports each year. Last spring, I watched a bird build a nest tucked at the base of a substantial tuft of grass over a number of days. Weeks later, I watched this same bird going and coming again with bits of food. I heard the hungry cries from tiny, unseen beaks each time she returned.  

We’ve found garter snakes dozing on the stone steps at the meadow’s edge. We’ve surprised fawns, curled into impossibly tiny piles of soft, spotted fur, hidden in the sun-warmed grass for the day by a hungry mother who needed to roam farther to sustain herself than her baby’s legs could handle. 

We’re feeling for our role as part of the nature of this place. The work is necessarily on-going—removing the invasive weeds and inviting in and cultivating a healthy plant and soil community. We’re realizing first hand how wrong we are to assume that what the earth needs is for us to leave it alone. This place absolutely needs active care and we are learning and evolving our approaches and doing our best.

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I’ve simultaneously been reading through (and testing on) a list of Bainbridge Island Metropolitan Parks and Recreation District’s (BI Parks) various management plans—vegetative, natural area, trail development—as part of the qualifying process of becoming a park steward. I’ve found the language disheartening, “A fully integrated management approach is needed to successfully heal the degraded systems… It is important to emphasize that the rehabilitation of these lands will be a long-term process (20 plus years), without quick fixes or simple prescriptions.” 

I learned about this opportunity a little over a year ago when I began looking for any indication that my meager trailside efforts at pulling ivy off trunks and uprooting holly seedlings in Gazzam Lake might be plugging into some thoughtful, coordinated effort at care that increased the health of my home forest.

The park stewards opportunity felt exactly right, and in the new year, I began the work of qualifying. I invited Alex to join me, and over the course of a month we attended a handful of BI Parks organized volunteer events to familiarize ourselves with their approach to the maintenance and restoration of the nearly 1,600 acres in their care.

We chose work parties that focused on parks we visit regularly. We spent two Saturday mornings pulling Rocky Mountain maple saplings (not invasive, per se, but showing invasive tendencies in this environment according to the work party coordinator who led our efforts) out of the soft mulch beds at Blakely Harbor park, former site of Port Blakely Mill Company, established in 1864 and among the world’s largest lumber mills in its heyday over a century ago. We spent another wading into yet-to-bloom salmonberry thickets to pull out the occasional star-shaped stalk of Himalayan blackberry at Fort Ward Park, a coastal artillery built to protect the Bremerton Navy base, operational from 1890-1958.

I’m a solitary creature by habit, and the stewardship program appealed to me as a bridge to connect my contributions to others’ while maintaining some distance. I was surprised when I liked the requisite work parties. I liked spending a couple hours with a group of strangers who shared a sense of obligation to our public spaces and also clearly found community—if halting and awkward and based only on that shared obligation—in doing so. I liked finding marginal work zones where I could quietly observe the unfolding efforts of so many hands, making my contribution to the changing scene’s edge.

Once we’d met this requirement, I broached the subject of the park steward position with the volunteer coordinator. The invitation to meaningful action anchored in community and restoration science was on the other side of this encounter, I was sure. “Park Stewards!” she replied with genuine alacrity. “That program sorta went dormant in COVID-times. We haven’t really fired it back up. You two could be the ones who get it started again!” 

I’ve since reviewed management plans, trail building processes, invasive species removal priorities. It’s clear that it will take a coordinated effort of many hands—volunteer hands—to restore local public lands to relatively basic levels of health. The urgency of the language contained in these documents contrasts glaringly with the program’s dormancy, like alarmed shouts into an empty and echoing room.  

We walk to Gazzam Lake from home. It’s easy to think of my obligation to the land ending at the legal boundaries of “my property.” It’s also impractical, from an ecological perspective. There is no separation between the half of the ravine we “own” and the half whose owners we’ve never met. Following this logic, a mere fifteen minute walk spans the distance between the ravine and the park’s boundary—there’s no significant separation there, either. 

On this walk it’s very clear what land is cared for and what land has been degraded and left to continue its degradation—where a sense of obligation begins and where it ends. But what about those in-between spaces? The ones that link the little bit of habitat that we help to recreate (or fail to create) on our “properties” with our publicly held lands? 

What chance does the 400 acre Gazzam Lake have of the kind of health I can imagine for it, that the parks district can plan for it, that is possible, with just a few sets of hands working toward it for a handful of hours each month?

Concluded next week.

On the tenth day of spring I got a text message from a good friend and fellow woods wanderer: “The trilliums are just now blooming in the Grand Forest. Diamonds tucked into moss.” 

The thrill I felt at reading her message was tinged ever so slightly with disappointment—that my friend was the deliverer of such glad tidings, not the trilliums themselves, whom I had just visited the day before. At dusk I had walked the steep trail through Gazzam Lake where they are tucked in easy-to-miss pockets lining its switchbacks. I squinted against the gathering darkness in the places I knew they grew, trying to pick up on the brightness of their white blooms. I hadn’t seen any.

No matter, I decided, they’d be happy to see me—and I them—even if I was late to this spring’s bloom. My dog and I headed to the woods early the next morning. To my relief, our morning visitation confirmed our dusk findings from 36 hours previous: the trilliums of Gazzam Lake had yet to flower. 

The Grand Forest sits at the center of Bainbridge Island. About three miles to its southwest, tucked against the Salish Sea, is Gazzam Lake. I know that microclimates—a biologist friend once told me Bainbridge Island has seven—at least partly explain this. But it’s as if spring’s advance falls somewhere in the few miles that span the distance from one patch of this plant to the next, a wave of blooms erupting in its wake.

Trillium are so named for a repetition of parts in triplicate—three leaves, three sepals, three petals, three stigmas. On my morning walk, the trio of green sepals clutching the white bundle of unfurled petals on the closest to flowering trillium I found had just begun to loosen their grasp. The petals would probably follow suit in the inbound warming and sunny weather. 

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Among my informal Gazzam Lake forest studies over the years I’ve included an annual trillium count. I’ve never recorded this number—each feels so unique as I note it that I’m sure it will pulse at me from a mental map that I can layer into a chronology at the conclusion of each walk’s census. This technique, of course, fails me; I count each year, nonetheless. 

Along with my counts, I’ve made a point of clearing space around the trilliums, particularly if any invasive plants are present. Trilliums are perennial and will spread slowly via their rhizomatous roots, but they reproduce by seed. My Plants of the Pacific Northwest elucidates:

Each seed has a little, oil-rich appendage that is attractive to ants. The ants lug the seeds back to their nests, where they eat the appendages or feed them to the larvae and then discard the remaining seeds on their rubbish piles. This is a reasonably effective mechanism for seed dispersal, especially for plants of the dim, becalmed forest floor.

There has to be hospitable ground for the seed to land; even when the two meet, it can take as long as ten years for a seed to evolve into a mature, flowering plant. The most prolific patch of trilliums I know in Gazzam Lake numbered somewhere in the upper teens last year. A drift of flowering trilliums accrues over decades. I imagine watching this patch fill in over my lifetime, each year a shy plant or two joining the gentle ranks, slowly working up the courage to bloom.

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“Important places can provide a sense of continuity over time,” writes researcher Leila Scannell of her content analysis-based place attachment studies. In fact, memory is the most commonly cited psychological benefit of place attachment Scannell has identified in this research, reported by over two-thirds of participants. “Place can serve as the site of on-going traditions, such as annual holiday gatherings or cultural events.” 

Or an informal trillium census. I don’t remember how long ago I first noticed trillium growing by the trail that climbs the slope from the sea’s edge to Gazzam Lake. I’m sure I counted what I saw though—that is my habit, however it disappoints me that my instincts aren’t more profound, less perfunctory. I’m sure, too, that I reflexively cleared some space around them, knowing their slow growth habits—that is also my habit. The next year I knew where to look, and when. With time, a ritual emerged. 

As a child, I sensed and longed to acknowledge the holy in the passing of winter to spring each year. It felt an injustice that the celebration of Easter was forbidden by the spare and conservative expression of Christianity into which I was born. But Easter’s thin veil of Christianity failed to obscure its blatantly pagan origins from the keen eyes of those who decided such things for me. The holiday, along with its egg hunting, was expressly disallowed.

My trillium rites of spring appease that child. I imagine trillium spotting is not unlike Easter egg hunting—both requiring a keen eye, a sense of delight. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. Trillium, a lily, also has a range of time in which it appears, but the two events—Easter and the trillium bloom—reliably overlap.  The variety of trillium that grows in Gazzam Lake, Trillium ovatum, flower white, but some deepen to pink as their blooms fade—not unlike the transformation of a dyed egg—for reasons unknown. And they are the first of the woodland ephemera to rise from the dead of winter and bloom on the forest floor each year, the original resurrection acknowledged by ancient vernal celebrations. 

“The flower blooms early in the spring (March – May), just as the robins appear, or ‘wake up,’ giving rise to the alternative common name ‘wake-robin.’” Even from my guidebook this flower enchants. 

As I trained my gaze on the ground for the telltale whorl of trillium leaves pushing through the soil, I registered all the other seasonal advances. I checked the wild ginger patches for blooms, but their new leaves had just begun uncurling on the soil’s surface. The skunk cabbage had pushed their sunny lanterns through the muck, though, and the deer foot had sent up their slender stalks. Each of their folded trio of leaves looked like the closed maw of a carnivorous plant from a more exotic clime. One drift of deer foot I stooped to admire in profile made me laugh out loud—their disembodied, fanged mouths nodded by the dozens in the dappled sun.

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The next day, Alex and I headed up into the Olympic Mountains from the rain-shadowed town of Sequim, on the north end of the peninsula. We chose the Slab Camp Trail that connects into Deer Valley from the south bank of the Gray Wolf River. Our elevation was around 2,500 feet at the trailhead, so I didn’t head out looking for trilliums, but about three miles down the trail, Alex glimpsed one emerging from a thick tuft of green on the steep bank of a switchback. The flower he pointed out was a perfect bud exquisitely set in the aperture of its whorled leaves. My friend’s “diamonds set in moss” comment echoed. 

Cow-parsnip pushed their thick, umbelled stalks through the river’s sandy margins in regimental patches. We found duos and trios of trout lilies tucked into tufts of moss here and there, though they too had yet to bloom. But we spotted just two more trilliums on our twelve mile hike.

The following morning—Easter—we woke up at Salt Creek Recreation Area. We headed out from our campsite, climbing the ridge at its back to Striped Peak. The translucent pink lanterns of bleeding hearts glowed from the trail’s edge in the clearcut on the ridge. Interspersed, the crimson tinged leaves of Indian paintbrush began to relax from their rigidly upright positions. As we descended, a single fairy slipper marked the confluence of the Strait Slope Trail and the Cove Trail. Maidenhair fern hung their loose green fists from thin wrists off the wet rockface of the cove, still a month from entirely unclenching. 

By the time I was free to observe Easter, I had no wish to. No religious inclination remained, no attachment to the risen Christ. I was too old for egg hunts and otherwise too preoccupied to unearth some more resonant meaning in the once-forbidden holiday. But now? 

What is the relationship between tradition and memory and the holy? By what means do our places hold such abstractions for us? How is this all connected? I don’t want to dispel my own wonder by trying to name it; I’m content with my curiosity and my trillium watch.

We came across a patch of trilliums toward the end of our Easter hike, blinking in the sun—a phenomenon of maybe ten minutes on the occasion that cloud coverage and sun angle cooperate. They were a community of twenty or so, most of them still too young to bloom, or perhaps just disinclined this year, as happens. But a small number of them—five, six—were beginning to unfurl their trios of white petals. Sunny anthers peaked out from inside, reaching for and welcoming the warmth. 

This is where I find and make meaning now, on “the dimmed, becalmed forest floor,” where each spring, in the few moments before the canopy closes out the sun with leaves, these perfect little flowers bloom, a clockwork resurrection.  

“I’m really interested in the psychological side of things,” Maggie continued. “The physiological things—you know, lower blood pressure and pulse rate, respiratory rate—I think that’s all common sense. I’ve read enough studies with enough people to tell you how this is going to go: Nature is good for you.

“I want to see research bloom in this area for health and wellbeing. Specifically, I’m hoping to see it expand in a spiritual direction,” she followed. We discussed how her 2020 paper, “The Interrelationship of Shinrin-Yoku and Spirituality: A Scoping Review,” meandered away from the well-tread realm of the physiological benefits of forest therapy into the numinous.

“Researchers discovered spirituality, as a central construct, emerged as a part of a therapeutic process conducted in a natural environment. Even interaction with nature, via gardening, showed a provision of a human-nature relationship that offered development of spiritual well-being,” she and her coauthors wrote.

Another paper Maggie coauthored, publication forthcoming, picked up where her 2017 review left off, reviewing the literature on shinrin-yoku from 2017–2022. While this paper highlights on a study by study basis ample correlation between the practice of shinrin-yoku and nurturing the human spirit, it wasn’t named or quantified as such: “The literature review revealed a dearth of empirical studies connecting specifically the term SY/nature with spirituality,” reads the paper.

“We weren’t able to find any connection between spirituality and nature in research,” Maggie confirmed on our walk. “Maybe those papers didn’t come up because we didn’t specifically say ‘meditation’ as a key word, but some might argue that meditation is not necessarily spirit. I think sometimes you connect with your spirit in meditation…”

It’s hard to name spirit let alone define its attributes, needs, environs. When I asked Maggie to try to name what it was she meant when she said she came to the forest to connect with spirit, or what she expected it to show up as in the research she conducted, she shrugged. She was okay with the mystery of it, whatever it was. “Okay, I think it’s all about the breath,” she said, finally. “The in breath, and the out breath. At any given moment it’s all we really have.”

It sounds simplistic, but I think she’s onto something here. It’s something that amazes me each time I consider it, too, so I visit the thought frequently.

Not only that I have my breath, but that I have my breath because of the trees with which I’m surrounded. And the intimate exchange in which we find ourselves: carbon dioxide for oxygen. Not from trees, generically, but these trees, specifically. And not only the oxygen that supplies us with breath, but the air that carries in its currents and eddies wellness in the form of the beautiful smells of the forest.

A moment spent in recognition and gratitude for this relationship upon each walk through the forest would probably satisfy the entirety of my spiritual needs, however difficult to enumerate.

Cedars cross-pollinate via wind. Their scents don’t also serve their propagation as is a logical guess. This discovery leaves me not knowing why cedars smell so good, unless only to benefit breathing beings. By inhaling deeply and often of their intoxicating scent I am fortifying my immune system. It floors me. Leaving a few grateful carbon exhalations under such a generous tree seems like a small token of gratitude. Maggie shared my delight at this.

A bird began shrilling at us. Instantly, Maggie incorporated the sound into her experience. “Like this bird right now, just hearing that beautiful chirping, and how I can connect that with my breath, and the pause of each inhalation and exhalation. How I can carry that sound with me now for a while, and go ‘oh, that’s so beautiful.’ And I think that’s why we really relax around nature sounds: the ocean, the birds.”

We walked quietly for a moment, and she added, “A lot of it is just the peacefulness and the quietude here. And quietude has kind of a spirit to it.”

“I can’t describe the spiritual connections I feel in the woods. I just get a lot of joy out of being here. This is my sanctuary. This is my church.”

As we continued walking, she greeted one couple by name, knew them from yoga class, one they’d all just attended earlier in the day. She mentioned, over and over, wondering what other people were experiencing as a regular occurrence on her walks.

“I wonder what that woman is here for,” she said by way of example as we passed a lone walker moving in the opposite direction. I was asking Maggie to tell me what her experience was, and it was clear that at least part of that experience was of being a researcher at heart and wanting to set up an informal survey of everyone who walked by, to ask them what they were there for, understand what their experiences were, what needs they came to the forest to have met.

Maggie did eventually retire from her professorship at the University of San Francisco in 2018, but retirement doesn’t apply to Maggie’s curiosity, nor her work ethic. Since then, she’s debuted as adjunct faculty at the University of Washington, she continues to publish research papers on nature and its implications for the whole of human wellness—she named at least three distinct research topics she’d like to publish on during our ninety-minute conversation—and she is working on a book about awe and nature.

As we approached the lakeside bench toward the end of our walk together, Maggie introduced the final sense, “The last is taste.” And here she paused.

“I get this question from people a lot,” I said to her, “‘When you say you use all five senses, what are you tasting?’”

“That’s why I brought the tea!” she exclaimed. “I don’t do this every time, but sometimes I have a little tea ceremony. It gives me the opportunity to sit, and look around me, and be even more slow moving through nature,” she said before adding with a laugh, “Am I licking trees? No!”

Maggie attended a forest bathing seminar taught by Amos Clifford, founder and CEO of the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides, a US based educational and certifying agency. In her guided experience, Clifford foraged edible plants from the landscape that he and participants steeped in hot water they’d carried in with them. Their tea was a literal and temporal taste of place.

I noted a number of edible plants in the margins of the trail as we walked together. I picked a paddle of miner’s lettuce from the forest floor. A suspicious drop sat suspended in perfect sphericality at the leaf’s tip. In a park frequented by a lot of dogs I didn’t brave the mystery droplet.

I often forage, but I’ve never grazed. I loved this idea of dropping a few things into hot water and tasting them on the spot—once the fir tips have sprouted perhaps, or with the flowers of the salmonberry, which are blooming in tiny fuschia exclamation points all over the forest right now.

Luckily, Maggie brought a thermos of ginger lemon tea. As we settled onto the bench at the edge of Gazzam Lake, she poured a steaming stream into a pair of Scandi made porcelain teacups she produced from a small pack, carefully wrapped in a red and white printed tea towel. She was not fussy about it, but it was clear that she was fully present to the moment and her movements, that each item had been carefully chosen, that, when she did pour her own cup of tea and bring it to her lips, the entirety of her attention was focused on the sensation of taste in that moment.

She noted that one gift of a tea ceremony as part of a walking practice was the time it gave one to really be still and fully sensitized in place. “It completes the sensory experiences, really coming home to you in nature, and feeling that presence. Sitting is stationary, so there’s a grounding feeling with that. Especially when I’m sitting on the earth, I just feel more energy pulling on my sits bones, I breathe easier, my diaphragm is more open. I think it just gives me an opportunity to rest, relax, and let go.”

We took a few moments, a few long breaths, we stared out at the reedy margins of Gazzam Lake and the waterfowl and birds that soared and swooped and scooted over and across it.

Maggie emphasized how privileged we are to live where we do, she and I, close enough to this beautiful, forested reserve to walk here daily if we wish. She restated again her interest in researching the effects of greenspace interventions in urban settings, and how our comfort in this setting is also a privilege. She expressed a desire to see more people exposed to green environments and an increase in psychological ease in forested landscapes and thereby full access to the benefits she experiences from her time in the forest.

“It brings me into presence. Looking at those mosses, and feeling those mosses, and smelling those mosses, and listening to the birds, it makes me more aware of—put the cell phone down, put the laptop away, be more present to people, be more present to yourself. Be kinder to yourself. Have compassion for yourself.

“We’re intune with nature because we are nature. We’re a part of nature. A dynamic part of it.”

Soley, Maggie’s precious eleven year old labrador, turned her nose into the wind. We admired her calm presence to whatever she sensed on the breeze slipping off the lake.

“She is pure spirit,” Maggie said, lovingly.

As the three of us stared out at the lake, and Maggie and I sipped tea, I told her that when I’ve been away for a couple days, particularly when I’ve otherwise been habituated to being in the forest daily, I feel a pull back again.

In my first conversation with Maggie in which I shared with her my interest in place attachment the concept didn’t immediately resonate with her. She described herself as a nomad: she’d lived all over California, elsewhere in the US, here on Bainbridge most recently, in France for a while just after she retired, in Switzerland for a time.

“I’m thinking about moving to Portugal!” Maggie pronounced, “But what about Gazzam!?”

There it is, I thought. I smiled back at her—I get it. Because a forest bath calls for the same ingredients as place attachment: time, depth of attention. That’s not to say either of us are forever bound to living where we do and regularly accessing Gazzam Lake as we are in the habit of doing. But she loves it. She gets it. This place also works on her, she’s also attached.

She poured me another cup of ginger lemon tea.

“Right now, we could paint a picture in our mind of this lake,” said Maggie, replacing the lid on the thermos. “And we could call upon it when we’re not here.”

I recalled Krista Tippett’s interview with the late John O’Donohue in which he said, “You should always keep something beautiful in your mind…[With] some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness.”

“Yes! And I also feel that pull back to these woods when it’s been a few days,” she circled back, “I’ve also been to the Grand Forest—does it do anything for you?”

She referred to another beautiful, forested park on Bainbridge Island. One we are lucky to have. “You know,” I responded, “The trees there are bigger; the forest is actually healthier by a lot of metrics…and it doesn’t do the same thing for me. This is my place here.”

“It doesn’t do the same thing for me, either!” she enthused.

We sat back and sipped our tea, basking in our senses, in our familiarity and enchantment with this place, searching the branch tips for some bit of it to taste on our next visit.

Part One

“There needs to be a willingness, and almost an invitation from nature for it to have a positive effect,” said my friend Margaret Hansen (Maggie) as we sat down to tea on a bench at the edge of Gazzam Lake. We’d each separately spent hours walking in these woods and sitting on this bench. This was our first time here together, the second day of spring.

“Don’t you find it generally inviting?” I asked.

“Oh, so inviting,” she said softly.

I had met Maggie one sunny day in the fall on the main trail winding through Gazzam Lake. I was out in the afternoon, which is not my habit, and our dogs facilitated the rest of the happy accident of our meeting.

As they sniffed and wagged at each other Maggie and I began to chat. “I’m here for my forest bath,” she must have said, because my interest in this casual encounter suddenly sharpened and I needled her with questions: Why did she use that phrasing? What did she know about forest bathing? Did she want to have coffee and tell me more?

Maggie was not only a regular forest bather, but also a researcher who focused the end of her career on shinrin-yoku. Within a five minute conversation I connected her name to a research paper—a compendium of all the various benefits of total nature immersion—I had referenced extensively in my own professional writing.

Shinrin-yoku—which translates to forest bathing—was coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama, Japan’s Director of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. The concept of shinrin-yoku—which is simply moving through a forested setting engaging with each of the five senses—was a creative solution targeting a pair of seemingly unrelated issues. A National Geographic piece from 2019 reports: “The purpose [of developing shinrin-yoku] was twofold: to offer an eco-antidote to tech-boom burnout and to inspire residents to reconnect with and protect the country’s forests.”

And it worked. Accompanying shinrin-yoku’s rise in popularity in Japan throughout the nineties was a wave of research closely verifying—by a wide spectrum of metrics—its efficacy in supporting human wellness. Most simply put, “Forest bathing has positive effects on human physical and mental health, especially in enhancing immunity, treating chronic diseases, regulating mood, and reducing anxiety and depression.”

Neither the research nor the concept is limited to Japan—so much of the practice is ancient and intuitive, so much research from across the world is focused on the myriad ways humans benefit from close relationship to nature—but it does seem to have really been distilled and demonstrated most comprehensively there.

When Maggie and I met again she reminded me of the journey that led her to shinrin-yoku as both a researcher and practitioner.

Maggie began her career in the late seventies as a medical-surgical nurse. In the nineties, in an educational partnership between El Camino Hospital where Maggie worked and San Jose State school of nursing, she discovered an aptitude for teaching in clinical settings. She got a masters degree in nursing education from San Jose State so she could continue teaching. She was offered and accepted a clinical teaching position with De Anza College and later with the University of San Francisco. She began lecturing on pathophysiology in addition to teaching in clinical settings.

“I was nicknamed ‘the weeder,’” she laughed, “If you could make it through my course, you were good. Pathophysiology is the bones of being a nurse, and critical thinking, and understanding of the human body from a physiological point of view. It’s rigorous.”

Running alongside the golden thread of Maggie’s shining career was the less visible thread of her personal, at times acutely painful life. She remembered first finding solace in nature as a six year old when her parents divorced. She remembered her mother’s garden in southern California, filled with fruit trees, and summers spent in the San Bernardino Mountains as a Camp Fire Girl. “As a child, I always felt more comfortable in nature, or more at home,” she acknowledged.

“As opposed to your actual home, or in groups of people, or in school?” I clarified.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Maggie nodded vigorously, “Emphatically yes! I was totally calmer, just a different person.” This proved to be a valuable bit of self-knowledge, identified at a young age.

She completed a doctorate from the University of San Francisco in four years. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study technology-based nature interventions in post-surgical patients in Iceland. While there, she developed, designed, and taught a graduate level course on Integrative Medicine at the University of Iceland. She discovered a natural talent for technical writing, an interest in the intersection of wellness and technology. Nature was there too, ever present in her curiosity about what gave patients better healing outcomes.

“Nature and my beliefs about healing were intertwined early on in my life. And I think it had to do with how it healed me as a child. And that continued throughout my life.”

The thread of the personal, painful narrative caught the light again. When Maggie was still in her early thirties, her beloved sister Diana Clare—“a second mother” ten years older than Maggie—died of cancer. Two months later, Maggie was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Reeling from her sister’s death and awaiting a critical brain surgery while parenting two small children, Maggie began experiencing debilitating anxiety. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Intuitively, she began spending as much time as she could in nature. Reflecting on this experience, she noted how it influenced her research interests. “I’m really interested in the effects of nature on depression, the psych/soc aspects of nature,” she spoke in the same abbreviations peppering her reviews—phsys, or physio, psych, soc—a beautiful layering to witness.

“It definitely helped my anxiety to spend time in nature,” she remembered of her cancer at 33. “When I took the children into the forest it would get even better, being there with them. We would do a family walk every Sunday in the woods. I could relax.”

Later in her life, cancer struck a second time. She’s totally healthy now, she noted gratefully, and believes her regular practice of forest bathing is partly to be credited.

“I think that nature inherently protects me from getting cancer again,” she stated confidently. Her own research review has highlighted the fact that the aromatic signatures of trees contribute to human synthesis of white blood cells, the kind that fight cancer cells.

“If I do get cancer again, then my choice will be really to get down on my hands and knees and snort mushrooms, snort phytoncides,” she laughed at herself. “Give me that moss over there too! There are medicinal qualities to this whole place!” She mimed an exaggerated mad grab of the forest’s bounty, held a lichen draped branch to her face and inhaled deeply. We both laughed.

In 2015, toward what was supposed to be the end of Maggie’s career as a professor at the University of San Francisco (USF) School of Nursing, she read Professor Yoshifumi Miyazaki’s research on shinrin-yoku and the physiological effects of slowly walking through nature using all the senses.

Commonly prescribed and practiced in Japan for its stress relieving effects, Maggie’s search surfaced similar research from around the world—Korea, Italy, Poland—all with compelling evidence that a simple practice of moving slowly through a forested landscape engaging with each of the senses had myriad positive health outcomes. Maggie and a team of colleagues set to work writing a review of the literature and publishing their findings in the 2017 paper “Shinrin-Yoku (Forest Bathing) and Nature Therapy: A State of the Art Review.”

I asked Maggie how her research informed her practice of spending time in the woods. She noted that she doesn’t come here for exercise and doesn’t think of her walks in the woods as workouts. “I want to lower my heart rate, not raise it,” she delineated. “I’ve slowed down a lot.”

With that distinction, she oriented me to her practice.

“My gateway sense is my smell,” she said, pausing and turning her nose up into the air in a quiet bend of the trail. “That’s my breath, so I’m breathing in whatever is here. I don’t really know what’s here!” she laughed, “Other than I smell pine trees, I smell dirt, like that smell when the sun hits the dirt?”

I smiled inwardly, unaware of a single pine tree in the forest. I knew exactly what she was talking about though—we were smelling the beneficial aromatic signatures of fir and cedar—I’d learned this from reading Maggie’s research.

“The next [sense] is vision,” she continued. “Oh, and I become very grateful for my vision. I get into this deep sense of gratitude just staring deep into the forest. All that green.

“And then I go to touch; touching the bark; putting my hand on the needles of the pine tree; that would lead me into putting my nose closer.”

She held up a chunk of decomposing wood. “I’m really interested in how this feels. The texture. The beautiful colors. Here’s a smell—” she offered the chunk to my nose.

I leaned in and inhaled deeply. “Oh, that’s a great smell,” I said, and I meant it.

“Isn’t it?”

“It’s how I want to smell when I die,” I said.

“Me too!” she agreed.

She placed the wood back on the forest floor where she found it and moved on to the trunk of a young bigleaf maple. “This moss begs me to touch it. It feels like cornsilk. And that mindfulness, really trying to feel the qualities of this moss, brings me right into the present moment.”

This quality of presence made Maggie an excellent walking companion; she was quick to be delighted and entirely engrossed in the physical experience. I loved her orientation—she was looking to be awed. She was there to access her sense of wonder, and she was never disappointed.

“Can you imagine, this came from a seed!” she said, craning her neck to stare into the canopy of a cedar while affectionately patting its solid trunk, carpeted in a low pile of seafoam green moss.

“And maybe we can take this exercise and apply it to our partners,” she offered wisely when I asked her what such a practice translated to in a life. She talked about getting curious, how we can learn to practice close observation in a forest and apply it to the challenges in our lives, our relationships. “You know, ‘help me understand you,’” she said. “Nature is the best teacher.”

“This place slows everything down for me. Even if I have a monkey mind, or stuff going on in my life that may be challenging, how does this experience [of forest bathing] affect that challenge, and how I respond to that challenge?” she asked.

Concluded next week.

Spring is here. It arrived last weekend, four days ahead of schedule, with temperatures in the sixties and sunny skies heralded in the forecast for an entire week of build up. The first such weekend each year has been unofficially earmarked as opening weekend at a five acre property in our custody on the west shore of Lake Cushman.

In preparation to go we dusted off the “to the lake” protocol: check the Facebook page for road and river status; prepare food and pack the cooler; double check the contents of the camp kitchen kit; pack for access—chainsaws, a peavey; pack for work—tools, Carharts, leather gloves; pack for play—a small pack, a water bottle, a towel; pack for rest—a hammock, a book, a yoga mat, wool blankets.

Nestled between the wilds of the Olympic National Park to the northwest and the Mount Skokomish Wilderness to the north, Puget Sound adjacent Hoodsport and Highway 101 to the east, the Skokomish Reservation to the southeast, and vast state-managed timberlands to the south and west, Lake Cushman glints in the convergence of the wild and “man-altered” landscape. 

It is itself such a convergence. Lake Cushman is a hybridized hydrological feature—a natural lake that formed when the steeply cascading North Fork of the Skokomish River flowing east out of the Olympic Mountains hit their flatter, wider foothills and then was impounded—that is dammed—in 1925. The result was a reservoir eight times larger than the original lake. 

The epitome of the wild-urban interface, the margins of Lake Cushman include clearcuts and designated wilderness area; the north end of the lake is crowned by snow-capped mountains and a national park, the south end plugged by a pair of dams; where we are perched above the lake the broad trunks of old growth fir, hemlock, and cedar teem with the invasive ivy planted by our predecessors. 

We come here to bask in this wildish edgestate for as much of each year as we can.

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There exists a discrete threshold between winter and spring, and it was there running like a ribbon through our two days at the lake. I could have traced its line with chalk on the gravel road—spring in the sun, winter in the shadow. 

I could have named the moments we crossed it—winter from dusk to dawn, spring again the moment the sun crested the ridgeline across the lake, flooding the fir, cedar, and hemlock grove of our steeply sloped parcel with streamers of light. It caught the fingers of smoke curling from the green wood smoldering on our fire in angular shafts, a world-class light show for an audience of two.

Alex uncovered a rough-skinned newt, still winter dozing contentedly under a cedar shingle. Her movements were slow, dazed. But suddenly the thin line between winter and spring was at her feet and he watched as she took her first sleepy steps into wakefulness for the year.

As we worked through the weekend—Alex shoring up the viable but tired cedar dock, me continuing the slow and perennial work of pulling invasive ivy and tending our brush fire—I thought about the seasonal transition we were undertaking. How difficult it is to make plans this time of year, or dress, or anticipate and prepare for the fluctuations. But we do it. We’ve figured out how to live well within wide bands of possibility. 

It occurred to me the adaptability required to undergo a seasonal shift is not unlike the quality of resilience with which I want to fortify my sense of place attachment, to this place in particular. This is a new relationship for me, and relatively informed—by an understanding of place attachment, by an experience of place loss, by general knowledge of this peninsula ecosystem and an interest in how it’s changing. Lake Cushman teaches a certain quality of flexible attachment. I’m learning a lot.

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We never really know when we’ll be able to go into the lake for the first time—deep snow leaves the gravel forest service roads accessing our spot impassable for much of the winter; then in the spring the undammed South Fork of the Skokomish River, along which our access road runs, floods, again leaving the road impassable for an indefinite amount of time. 

Once we’re granted access we never really know what we are going to find. We cross our fingers that our biggest fir and hemlock have survived the winter storms; we cross our fingers that our biggest alder snags haven’t. The uncertainty is the only given.

We’ve come to include this lakeside perch in our expanded concept of home. We’ve come to love it, and to love sharing it with those eager to access the same sense of awe it brings us. We intend to know it, and care for it, and champion it to its healthiest expression. 

And we are learning to hold it all very lightly.

Each year, new logging scars appear on the land, both enroute to the lake and visible from its shores. Last spring when we arrived, we discovered that about a third of the hillside facing our dock from across the lake had been logged, just at the edge of the wilderness. 

The cedars that were replanted on the tail of a harvest probably 25 years ago are dying in the sunny margins our access road. The Douglas fir replanted at the same time seem robust, but University of Washington Climate Impacts Group research indicates that they too will disappear from much of their territory in Washington, including in the south Puget Sound and southern Olympics—where Lake Cushman is. It also notes the arrival of fire on the Olympic Peninsula as never before—this place will be as much as 1000% more vulnerable to wildfire in the arriving drier, hotter climate regime.

We are witnessing a shift in forest composition each time we drive to the lake and survey what the timber companies are replanting in the wake of their harvesting. No longer the species I’ve always associated with our region—western red cedar, western hemlock, Douglas fir—they’re planting species of pine I don’t recognize, and a different variety of fir I have yet to learn, no doubt better suited to long periods of drought, more fire resistant. 

This winter, our bank lost a large clump of alder, old by the species standard—maybe they sprouted ninety-nine years ago when this bank was newly a bank, no longer just a continuation of the woods that climbed from the undammed river’s edge below. Our artificial littoral zone—too steep to be stabilized by living plant life—is slowly eroding. Someday our dock will slough off the side of the hill and into the lake. 

Change is happening here, visibly and rapidly. Each permutation feels like an invitation to recommit to this place as it iterates. So far those changes have been notable, but undisruptive. We’re practicing resilience. With each season we hope to foster an attachment that serves us when the changes are someday more drastic, one that reminds us to reorient to a best possible scenario again and again, and work like hell to bring it about, holding its possibility—but lightly.

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In three years we’ve kept at the work of peeling back the layers of garbage, shoddy craftsmanship, and invasive plants left behind in this place; taking down alder snags, thinning big leaf maple, and clearing the understory of its fuel load; scraping puce paint off the dock, resetting proud nails, and digging rusted rebar and the twists of chain link fencing out of the lakebed. 

As we work, a singular essence of place is shining through, a signature wild infusion. We’ve spent days swimming with newts, boating into layer upon layer of beckoning blue mountains, hiking from trailheads at the lake’s edge, and bobbing around in our PFDs twenty yards off the dock where we can see the regal form of Mt. Rose rising up from the water with Mt Ellinor hovering behind. We’re gobsmacked by it. Despite its logging scars and the chortle of outboard motors, being at the lake feeds our hunger to taste our own wildness.  

Our bank and the hundreds of years old trees stabilizing it might all let go and fall into the lake next winter. The forested edges of Lake Cushman may very well burn one day. There is no illusion of constancy here—Cushman promises nothing.

In an effort to restore the salmon fishery, the Skokomish Tribe may one day call for the removal of the dams, leaving our five acres perched on a hillside, 100 steep feet from a raging river’s edge. “[Chinook salmon] Population recovery will require both the restoration of normative watershed functions and characteristics, and the recovery of Chinook life history patterns adapted to them,” reads the 2010 “Recovery Plan for Skokomish River Chinook Salmon,” co-authored by the Skokomish Tribe and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. I want to prepare myself to celebrate the loss of my lakeside perch in service of the vitality of this place I love.

As I face the possibilities, I want to attach myself to this ecosystem in such a way that my actions in this place support its wellness as an extension of my own. I want to hew to a commitment to accept and adapt to every change. I don’t want my attachment to stand at odds with what is, or with what is best for this land; I want to learn from the evolutions of the land what it means to live in the paradox of radical acceptance of impermanence and deeply attached love.

Alex and I jumped in the lake on Sunday before we left. It felt like it had just melted that morning, but the sun was warm enough to counter the water’s effects. The impermanence is the preciousness, we know. We sprawled across the dock, relishing the seasons’ edge. 

Ansel Adams’ 1942 photograph “The Tetons and the Snake River” drew a collective gasp from the audience when the lights dimmed and Catharina Manchanda, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, began her lecture on “New Topographics of Man Altered Landscapes.”

“That’s exactly it!” Manchanda enthused, “That is exactly the point of this piece, its desired effect. There is a lyricism to this work. Adams has attempted to capture that moment of awe, and quite successfully as we’ve just experienced!”

There was a grand landscape tradition, she continued, one that informed the landscape paintings that predated photography and was adopted wholesale by the new medium as it emerged in the early nineteenth century. It prescribed framing, lighting, the adherence to the visual succession of fore, middle, and background. It insisted on communicating the virtue in wildness as a vehicle for awe. In other words, it was going for the gasp.

In Adams’ iconic shot of the Wyoming range the silver and sinuous Snake River winds from fore into middle ground. Flanked on both sides by heavily treed banks, the river is framed in such a way that it creates a distinct band in the foreground and again, after a sharp turn into the comparatively bare middle ground. Middle ground is delineated from background in the hard horizontal line of the river’s farthest bank. In the background stand the jagged, backlit Tetons capped by tempestuous skies.

Manchanda advanced her slides to one of the photographs featured in the 1975 exhibition on which her talk was focused—New Topographics: Photographs of Man-Altered Landscapes. It was a work by Robert Adams (no relation to Ansel), “Tract House, Westminster, Colorado,” in which a camper trailer is parked in front of a dilapidated, aluminum siding clad building. A pronged television antenna reaches toward the top edge of the image.

Some tittering rose from the audience. “Yes, I know!” Manchanda encouraged us, awkward laughter spreading as she continued advancing through a succession of mostly black and white photographs: urban streetscapes, suburban housing developments under various stages of completion, derelict mine shafts, the intersecting lines of a highway viaduct and its shadows. “Decidedly underwhelming, right?”

Yet Manchanda clearly respected her subject matter, and left it to do its work. The patience with which she left us to our evolution of reactions was masterful. As the slides progressed, the audience slipped into silence. I sat in the cross hairs of a strange combination of feelings: hard-edged distaste, a vague sense of despair, recognition.

As I squirmed I tried to answer for myself, too simplistically, whether or not I liked the work. I didn’t, but why did it make me so uncomfortable? In the days that followed, I tried to name what lingered.

The work of the New Topographers pointed at a loss of place, and at humans—Americans—as the agents of that loss. There’s a nauseating sense of culpability mixed with impotence, and there’s grief in the work that is hard to confront—hard to name, even.

One visitor to the original 1975 exhibition—at which gallery attendants were tasked with collecting responses to the show—upon glimpsing his truck in a photograph, reflected, “At first they’re really stark nothing, but then you really look at them and it’s just the way things are. This is interesting, it really is.”

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I first encountered the work of the New Topographers as an art history major in a History of Photography course I took during my final college semester. My Alfred Stieglitz doppelgänger-fanboy of a professor was not the champion of this body of work that Manchanda is. He crammed in a dispassionate lecture at the close of the semester met by an equal dispassion from my colleagues and me, then promised us we wouldn’t be responsible for the material on the final exam.

I’d forgotten about the New Topographers entirely when I walked into the Plestcheeff Auditorium at the Seattle Art Museum in February. I’d registered my attendance because the title—specifically the “Man-Altered Landscapes” bit—intrigued me. A few slides in and I began to recall the subject matter from that lecture years ago, to recognize the same superficial dislike of the photographs I experienced upon seeing them the first time. But Manchanda’s lecture captured me.

New Topographics was coined and curated by William Jenkins of the George Eastman House (whose namesake founded Kodak) in Rochester, New York. The show explored the objectivity possible with the photographic medium. The body of work was “neutral” according to Jenkins, “reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion.”

The New Topographers claimed a journalistic approach, asking the viewer to form her own opinion of the content. “Modern photography had become known for stark black and white contrast and dramatic perspectives,” Manchanda wrote in an essay that accompanied a 2018 reinterpretation at the Seattle Art Museum of the 1975 original show at the Eastman House. Comparatively, “the New Topographics photographers had a decidedly quiet and descriptive approach.”

That approach had an angle, though. The more recent exhibition description notes that the original 1975 show was an about-face where depictions of the American landscape were concerned. “Taken together,” it reads, “they posed questions about the ever-expanding sprawl of housing developments and the social and environmental implications of this unchecked growth.”

In a 2010 Guardian piece, photography writer Sean O’Hagan notes that the 1975 New Topographics exhibition was the moment in art history “when a certain strand of theoretically driven photography began to permeate the wider contemporary art world.” However unconcerned the New Topographers claimed to be about expressing opinions, notions of beauty, and emotions, their work nonetheless struck a clear note. O’Hagan writes, “These images of the ‘man-altered landscape’ carried a political message and reflected, unconsciously or otherwise, the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded.”

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A little context provides more clarity. The first half of the 1970s was marked by the loud ringing of environmental alarm bells. In 1970 Earth Day was celebrated for the first time, coinciding with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1972 the chemical fertilizer DDT—called out by Rachel Carson a decade earlier in Silent Spring for its deleterious effects on raptor egg shells and by extension plummeting raptor populations—was banned. A year later the Endangered Species Act was passed. These were environmental wins, certainly, but at the same time harbingers of the crisis of place that has continued to unfold, inspire art, and demand action ever since. These were among our first collective reckonings with our negative impacts on the earth.

This reckoning quickly found expression in art. The American landscape is truly a many-splendored thing, But, the New Topographers communicated, to conflate the beauty found in the photography of Ansel Adams with the goodness of America is grandiose.

So much is captured in the work of the New Topographers, so much commentary packed into the commonplace scenes paired with their oddly specific names. Whether or not they would claim an intention to moralize, history has made the point for them: what American culture can take credit for is captured in New Topography’s “stylistically anonymous” photographs—erasing any essential quality of place with an insatiable appetite for generic development.

And this is, of course, the reason New Topography has stuck with me in the month since I attended Manchanda’s lecture. The sum of the work points not only to the disruption of the land, but by extension my connection to it. It forces me to confront one possible future in which the landscape has been entirely scraped of its specificity. It asks me to acknowledge an underlying unease, collectively held.

Like most Americans, I imagine, I would prefer to think of this country as Ansel Adams saw it, not as Robert Adams did. But as art critic J.J. Charlesworth writes in the publication Tate Etc., “What no longer functions in the idea of beauty is the sense that it represents something of the value and importance of being human.” The work of the New Topographers challenges me to confront a growing conflation between what is human and what is ugly. It suggests humanity has some work to do to disassemble this connection, to find its way back to a healthy attachment to the land.

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It was the first time that photographers turned their lens on the American landscape in a non-celebratory way, documenting the reality of an exploitive and expansionist approach to what was still collectively thought of as the America of Ansel Adams. Their neutrality is, as far as I’m concerned, neither necessary nor convincing: their assessment is self-evident in what they pointed their cameras at.

“A great photograph,” Ansel Adams considered, “is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” By this metric, I find the work of the New Topographers successful, powerful.

“You wouldn’t know you were here unless I told you,” it says to me. “We’re losing our connection to place—pay attention.” And I am.

“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:

1. 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

As I sit down to write this, we’re in for an inch and a half of rain in the next twenty-four hours. If I could hand pick the conditions in which to get creative work done, these are the ones I would choose: windy, heavy rain, low forties. 

I’ve been building a palette of place—a mental mood board of sorts, a compilation of the sensory input that together creates my experience of what it is to be at home on the Salish Sea at winter’s end.

I’ve just built a fire in the wood stove, partly to spoil the dog, who will scoot her entire backside onto the tile under the firebox and roast herself gleefully for hours, and partly for its ambient noise. Thus curated, my late winter auditory palette consists of: wind, rain hitting the metal roof just a few feet above my head, a crackling fire and ticking wood stove, and the occasional yip and growl of a dog dream.

The air smells of cedar and I couldn’t tell you at this point if the association for me between the smell of cedar and the sense of home has grown over the years or if I was born searching the air for it. 

Cedar surrounds me in all of its many expressions and life stages. The pungent live cedars whose scent carries especially well on winter’s wet air rain down their phytoncides. There is magic in knowing that when I can smell cedar, I am actively receiving wellbeing from it in the form of airborne chemicals released to protect the tree from bacterial and viral pathogens. 

Fragrant cedar siding clads our house and lines a handful of interior walls. The smell of cedar smoke from the chimney is occasionally wafted downward on strong gusts. The scent of decaying cedar logs—the sweetly soured edge overtop the cedar’s signature pleasant sharpness—lifts from the ravine. 

Layering in over the predominant notes of cedar is a smell so ephemeral, so particular to these last weeks of winter, it begs mentioning; the wild cherry trees have bloomed. If I stand under the perfumed canopy of a wild cherry in just enough light I can convince myself I’m smelling pink. It’s the only experience I’ve had that approaches synesthesia, mine for the taking for about three weeks, along a three mile stretch of road that parallels the shore.

I’m emerging from a winter lull where actually getting a taste of place is concerned. The last foraged food I ate was a small bundle of hedgehog mushrooms, harvested from the forest near my house before the deep freeze in mid January. 

But the nettles have pushed through the soil’s surface, and in their usual droves. I can taste their bitterness as I think of them, and all the associated goodness that comes with that quality of flavor. A 2022 National Institute of Health paper reviews the medicinal significance of the nettle: they’re rich in fiber, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidant compounds that work together in the body to lower blood pressure, reduce inflammation, placate ulcers, combat pain, and soothe arthritis, among other things. All in a humble, ubiquitous “weed.”

They’re ready to harvest now. For ease of walking barefoot and bare legged I’ve mostly cleared the nettles from around our house, but they’re prolific on the trails through the neighborhood and across the island. 

Opposite the stinging nettle end of the tactile sensation spectrum is the touch I enjoy most this time of year: moss. Along the back border of our home runs a waist high rock wall covered in feathery manes of moss. I’ve set to work in these last couple weeks excavating this wall out from under years of dead huckleberry and salal canes that have hidden the architecture of the cedar trunks and the stout stones with their crop of textural growth. 

Not much sun penetrates all the way to this ground; the trees along this perimeter have grown up in the years since the rock wall was constructed. I’ve cut back all the shrubs to give them a chance in the newly cleared space, but a big part of me hopes that the moss will migrate off the rock walls onto the nearly bare soil with a little encouragement.

As I move south down this mossy rock wall I’ve run into tangles of honeysuckle that have strangled a number of madrona saplings. Late winter is a great time for pulling weeds the local garden columnist Ann Lovejoy has just reminded us. As far as feelings go, pulling out wads and coils of vining, strangling plants—ivy, blackberry, honeysuckle, bindweed—and feeling each little hair of root break away as the main cord of the plant is lifted from the pliant soil is among the most satisfying. 

I turn my attention toward my vision. If each of these sensations—late winter’s sounds, smells, tastes, and feels—occupies a wedge of space on a palette of place, I wonder what must the wedge apportioned to sight look like, in comparison? Even when using language to imagine, I invoke sight: what must it look like? 

The colors of late winter are my favorite of the year. The catkins on the alder dangle in rusted pairs. This color is echoed in last year’s spent bracken fern, ocean spray blooms, and cedar fronds. 

Apart from these contrasting occasions of rust, and the first pink blooms of the cherries, the primary color experience of this place—year round, really, but in winter especially—is green. Green in every saturation and tone imaginable. 

The hazelnut’s catkins are a soft gold-green, the same gold-green that paints the smooth bark of the madrona at the moment. 

The madrona’s leaf, on the other hand—along with that of the evergreen huckleberry and the sword fern—is an emerald green—the lone jewel tone in this palette.

The boughs of the fir and hemlock trees are quintessential forest green. The cedar boughs in the late winter variety of light conditions can appear yellowish or bluish, and sometimes both in a spectacular tonal iridescence orchestrated by a bit of wind.

It is the trunks of the cedars though where the most astonishing array of green is to be found. In an informal experiment I have yet to bring a swatch of green fabric to one particular patch of one particular cedar trunk and fail to find an exact tonal match in the tree’s resident colony of mosses and lichens. Everything from mint to lime, seafoam to forest, and every tint and shade in between. An infinity in green.

All that on color alone, to say nothing of the patterns to be found in the exposed trunks of trees and the draping forms of evergreen foliage, or the rain that falls in visible undulations. To say nothing of the deer who have returned from wherever they disappear to in winter’s coldest months to again sit placidly in the rain for hours in the thick moss of my neighbor’s front garden.

A sea of green with a dash of rust, the scent of cedar and salt air, the sound of rain, the feel of moss underhand, and the gentle movements of deer—this spare elegance is the sensorial framework of place upon which the many textured and formed and colored and flavored experiences of the progressing seasons are laid overtop each other. There is something shining and singular in winter’s palette, an elegance with a lot to say about simplicity.

As spring approaches, the complexity of this sensory palette is already increasing, and that increase is, of course, welcome. We’ve just graduated from the sparest palette of the year with the first blooming shrubs and trees, the evening chorus of frogs, and the fists of bracken fern pushing through the soil. 

“I don’t know what prayer is. I do know how to pay attention,” Mary Oliver wrote in her well loved poem “The Summer Day.” There is no point to this—this exercise in constructing a mental palette of place—except to notice, and in doing so appreciate and honor my home and my senses and the passing of seasons more deeply. 

In the months following the Labor Day Santiam Fire that leveled Jawbone Flats and decimated the Opal Creek Wilderness, I experienced a quality of grief previously unknown to me. I spent the winter in what felt like a bottomless despair marked by complete incredulity at the rain that fell in sheets, slaking the land so thoroughly that it ran in ribbons down every channel, gully, and furrow willing to convey it to the sea. Disbelief that in summer this same place was so parched and vulnerable; where was this rain when we needed it?

I couldn’t bring myself to watch any of the flyover footage of the decimated ancient forest, but I tortured myself imagining it anyway. When I was successful at redirecting my thoughts in my conscious hours, the images haunted my dreams.

My inability to conceptualize home, and the admission that Opal Creek was many things to me, but in a literal sense it was truly never my home in that I never lived there for more than a couple weeks at a time, etched me. As an employee, I had longed to live in Jawbone Flats surrounded by the wilderness, and somehow, even after moving on from the organization and out of state, I held onto this possibility of spending an entire season, or an entire year, in Opal Creek at some point. Improbable as that might’ve been, it was now impossible.

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Somewhere in all of this swirling grief my nagging questions about home sent me in search of the chapter on place attachment I’d saved from a research and writing project I’d completed for work a couple years previously. The subject was so compelling to me at the time, though only tangentially related to what I was working on, that I impulsively stashed some content away—a couple experiments and the chapter by Scannell and Gifford from an environmental psychology textbook.

I scanned the thirty pages; about halfway through, the heading Place Loss jumped out at me and I slowed down to read it carefully. The authors described the work of researchers documenting responses to displacement of a number of communities from their environments, in which they qualify the grief exhibited as “comparable to the effects of separation from a loved one.” That felt accurate. 

But, they went on to say, the grief of displacement can be soothed by finding settings that refer to the lost place in some way. They said that finding home-like qualities in a new place, bringing in objects from the lost home place, and even creating symbolic representations of it, all eased the pain of loss. “In a psychological sense,” they wrote, “a person is not truly displaced when surrounded by referents of home” [note 1]. 

I had done this; I had gathered my Opal Creek curiosities around me: a collection of concretions George and I spent one 4th of July afternoon digging out of his riverbank; a core sample I found in the forest one day, a relic of Opal Creek’s mining history; a grocery bag filled with lichen pulled from a tree in Jawbone Flats my first winter with the organization and used annually as streamers on my Christmas tree. 

I also had been poring over hundreds of pictures, including a beautiful photobook my boss made me as a parting gift when I left the organization. 

I brimmed when I first recognized my new home on Bainbridge Island in the pictures of the cabins lined up along the road through Jawbone Flats. That winter after the fire Alex and I moved into the house we’d designed and built for ourselves which was obviously (but unconsciously) enormously influenced by the lost Opal Creek cabins. 

Even the Gazzam Lake cedar grove was reminiscent enough of Cedar Flats to provide some solace. I was truly surrounded by referents of home if I took a generous view of my new place and I took from them the comfort I could.

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I once heard the philosopher-writer Alain de Botton talk in an interview about the perfecting work of love. To love someone, he said, was partly to see them for who they are and partly to see them for who they could become, to see in them already the fully actualized person they aspire to be. In this way to love each other is to ennoble each other and dream each other into being [note 2].

Gazzam Lake is a whole new place to me since the fire. I visit the cedar grove regularly still, and I imagine the trees there in another thousand years, caught up to the age of the lost Cedar Flats grove in Opal Creek, now again a sapling nursery. I’ve begun to think of it as the future’s old growth forest, and it has since been endowed with a nobility I can’t fail to recognize. 

I’ve begun to take it more seriously, to find more to admire in the way it stubbornly keeps at life despite having been hacked to the ground, twice in places, and infiltrated with weeds. And I’ve begun to take my responsibility toward it more seriously too, asking myself what I can do now to encourage this place along toward its fullest potential. I still pull ivy from the margins of the trails; I long to do more.

Opal Creek, too, is on its way to becoming an ancient forest again. While the wilderness area remains closed to the public, the organization continues its caretaking work of Jawbone Flats and the road and trails accessing it. It also continues its work of environmental education, and has set up long term experimental plots in the rapidly regenerating forest to observe what comes back, and how it compares with what grew there previously. 

Future students of the rebuilt Jawbone Flats education center will be able to contribute to a living body of research on post fire ecological recovery. They’ll be able to witness climate-change driven redistribution and migration of tree species. They’ll get to know, and eventually come to love, the aspiring old growth forest. 

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Where is home now? 

I’m working on a definition, one that is more of a philosophical orientation than a physical pin in a map. 

I’m interested in the behaviors that reflect a sense of belonging strong enough to call home. I’m curious about the care that love elicits and familiarity invites. I’m exploring the idea of home as the place, places, I know well enough to care for.

I think of George and his love’s output—a decades long legal and political struggle, an attachment so deep and a love so persistent a wilderness was created; I think of the man I came across in Gazzam Lake, sawing down holly because it simply had to be done. 

I’ve been invited into Opal Creek. It’s winter, so access is an issue currently, but I expect that when the snows melt and the road clears I’ll make my way in, hopefully with a group of friends, hopefully with some objective, some meaningful task of practicality, some essential act of regeneration. I’m ready to witness what has transpired since my last visit. I’m eager to get to work dreaming into the future and rebuilding. 

While I’m waiting to get into Opal Creek, I’m cutting holly. I noticed yesterday on my walk through Gazzam Lake that the very holly knot where I encountered that man and his hacksaw has sprouted again. Its shoots are two feet tall. It’s time to hack it back again, and I haven’t seen the guardian of this slope since the first time I encountered him, years ago now. It’s my turn. 

Notes:

1. 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

2. Alain de Botton. “The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships.” "On Being with Krista Tippett, February 9, 2017. https://onbeing.org/programs/alain-de-botton-the-true-hard-work-of-love-and-relationships/

Although time certainly plays a role in place attachment, it is not always required; sometimes place attachments form more quickly, almost like love at first sight. This is more likely to occur when individuals experience congruence; the term place-congruent continuity describes the sense that a particular place fits with aspects of the self [note 1].

I experienced love at first sight once, upon moving from the Midwest to the Northwest for the second time, post college, and stumbling into a job and a community at Opal Creek. 

A week after I was hired by Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center in the autumn of 2008, I visited the Opal Creek Wilderness and Jawbone Flats, the private inholding owned by the non-profit and operated as an off-grid outdoor school, for the first time. Nothing I’d read about the place prepared me for what I encountered when I first arrived at the locked forest service gate that marks the trailhead into Jawbone Flats, a few miles down a narrow, precariously bridged road. 

The trees, though I’d read of their girth and height and volume and board feet, had presence and grandeur beyond any quantifiable descriptions. And the water—its clarity, its color, its textures as it flowed from swift current to cascade to eddy—I had no reference for beauty like this and it astonished me completely when I first encountered it.

What I found in the Opal Creek Wilderness that day was the most peaceful landscape I’d yet encountered inhabited by a group of people who, like me, seemed to thrive on nature. They spent all their time outside—recreating, working, growing and gathering food, and learning—and this orientation seemed to make them genuinely happy. Their belonging, both in natural and human communities, seemed so secure, so easy, and that sense of belonging was extended to me immediately.

The beauty surrounding me as I wandered into camp and this community for the first time and hiked the trail through the wilderness to Whetstone Mountain the next day confirmed what I’d suspected upon first seeing the job posting on Craigslist: I was meant to make my way to Opal Creek. Arriving in Jawbone Flats for the first time felt like a homecoming.

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In the six years I worked for the organization, initially as registrar and ultimately as a grant and communications writer, I spent as much time as I could in the wilderness. I lived and worked in Portland, but my executive director, to her credit and in gratitude forever, understood that I needed to have regular and meaningful immersion in the wilderness in which our work centered if my job was to be done well. She encouraged me to spend as much time as I could in Opal Creek. 

I learned many of the trails throughout the watershed intimately, walking their lengths at all times of the day and night, in all seasons. I learned about the plant and animal communities that populated the forest and aquatic environments. I gleaned as much information as I could about this place from walking it with the organization’s science instructors, visiting workshop instructors, and experts of various kinds. I familiarized myself with the use of field guides and identification books. I listened to stories late into the night. I read, read, read.

A natural and insatiable curiosity led me to lose time in rapt attention at the edge of the creek, or on my back peering into the canopy of half a dozen thousand-year-old trees, or within the splash zone of a waterfall. 

Certain named places—Cedar Flats (where stood the most unfathomably exquisite stand of ancient cedars I’ve ever seen, upstream from which stood another equally impressive stand of fir), Opal Pool, Mossy Lonesome, Pablo’s Chair, Sacred Rock, Skyhouse—demanded respects paid at regular intervals. When I sensed it had been too long, I would make my visitations, seeking out these places as long lost friends. 

I came to feel known by the place in return. The very land, spiny in places and covered in feet thick layers of duff in others, breathed. When I could sit still long enough I was overwhelmed with the sensation of all of us, myself and the host of life surrounding me, breathing together, intimately exchanging oxygen and carbon in reverent silence. 

Without knowing I was looking for it, that I’d previously lacked it, or that I’d even found my way into it, I was in a relationship with this place. It blossomed in the years I worked there and visited regularly and even when I left the organization and moved a state away, that sense of belonging in Opal Creek remained and was reinforced with each visit.

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I find it difficult to put a boundary around home now—is it Bainbridge Island? Puget Sound? Western Washington? 

The Pacific Northwest feels too broad a range to consider its entirety home, but might I, given I’ve lived all over this region in the last twenty years? Given my strong connection to Opal Creek? 

Is one even capable of attaching to a place as broadly defined and ecologically diverse as the Pacific Northwest? 

Might I be looking for a more poetic definition? Maybe home for me is the natural range of the western red cedar, for example, or simply the area in which life’s expressions—flora and fauna—are familiar to me by name. 

What about the places I’ve lived and left that are hundreds or thousands of miles away? Might home for some be a single and specific place and for others be a blend of places, a patchwork quilt of past and present?

What about places that were once home but have been taken in some way, altered beyond recognition? 

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Sometimes, the value of a place is revealed most clearly to us when the settings we hold most dear are threatened or lost [note 2]. 

On Labor Day 2020, a raging wildfire—started deep in an inaccessible fold of the mountains by lightning strike a month before and fanned into a 300,000 acre conflagration by a wind storm—consumed much of the 35,000 acre Opal Creek Wilderness, including the 15 acre Jawbone Flats environmental education center, the grove of ancients at Cedar Flats, Skyhouse, and the area surrounding Opal Pool. 

My friend George Atiyeh, the conservationist who led the efforts to protect Opal Creek in the 80s and 90s and lived at the edge of the wilderness, failed to evacuate and died in the same fire that leveled the forest he’d dedicated his life to saving. 

George called Opal Creek his heart’s home and many, myself included, repeated him. We said things like, “When I die, take me home to Jawbone.” We joked in all seriousness that the Opal Creek Wilderness and Jawbone Flats were our apocalypse plan. We imagined this primordial forest would remain constant even as the rest of the world devolved around it. 

And then it went up in flames. 

Concluded next week.

Notes:

1. 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

2. 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

Soon I had a mental map of the largest fir and cedar trees within the acreage comprising Gazzam Lake Nature Preserve. None were ancient, but some were easily a couple hundred years old and their presence felt familiar and comforting.

Most of the big fir were on steep slopes that I assume made them difficult for loggers to harvest safely when this place was cleared. Cedar—less valuable as a commodity—were left when they grew in homogenous stands away from the more valuable fir. A number of venerable cedar groves dotted the park.

One such stand began to waylay me as I wandered through it each day. The trail up from the water’s edge climbed switchbacks for half a mile before it widened and flattened in this spot. All the uphill momentum of the trail thus far pooled here, and slowly eddied back on itself in the fluted trunks of the graceful cedar that stood well spaced throughout this perched bottom.

The cedar had a softening effect, their presence was a perfect complement of fluidity and groundedness. I was drawn to this particular spot and made a point of routing myself past it daily. I naturally slowed when I entered this space, circling as I progressed up the trail, head tilted to see the crowns of the trees swaying in the wind and the brooding sky beyond them.

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I began using my time in this grove to check in with my breathing as I was learning to do in physical therapy. That I had been essentially breathing wrong, and for a long time, was a disorienting discovery, and a great deal of focus was required to take a quality breath.

I made a point each day of stopping under my favorite tree and spending a few breaths there, concentrating on pulling air deep into my belly and back, relaxing the knot of my diaphragm, the perennial tightness in my lumbar spine. There was a push and pull with every inhalation and exhalation, a circular energy at work in the body, expanding and contracting different muscles as it moved through, one I could sense and orchestrate if I was mindful enough.

As I practiced finding this breath pattern under the cedar I found an ease in my chest that I didn’t feel anywhere else. A gift, it seemed, of proximity to the cedar at work next to me, who I knew was also moving energy up and down her trunk in a circular and infinite, life distributing cycle.

I was learning the correlation between this expansive way of breathing and my emotional wellbeing via my autonomic nervous system. As I found myself drawn to this tree to breathe, I became conscious that I was in effect coming to the forest to calibrate my nervous system.

Research for a writing assignment on Shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing,” corroborated the sense of wellness time in the forest was giving me. I learned that spending time in trees, actively or at rest, measurably reduces blood pressure, cortisol, adrenaline, and blood-glucose levels [notes 1 + 2]. Correlating to this, in qualitative research people report an experience of decreased anxiety, depression, anger, confusion, and fatigue after time in the forest [note 3]. Being surrounded by trees also improves cognition and focus and eases some of the symptoms of ADHD [notes 4 + 5]. I learned that trees, cedars in particular, release phytoncides—chemicals that protect them from fungal and viral invasions—and that just by being under their canopy I was immersing myself in an aromatic chemical signature that boosted my immune system by spurring the creation of white blood cells [notes 6 + 7].

It wasn’t woo I was experiencing in the forest, it was wellbeing.

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At about the same time I was gifted the idea that a place I love could love me back through the lyrical prose of the late John O’Donohue in his meditation Beauty.

“How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth?” wrote O’Donohue. He suggested our places could have huge affections for us, missing us when we’re absent, rejoicing at our return.

He wrote that upon death a place might, “Miss your voice, your breath and the bright wave of your thought, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places.”

I had never consciously thought about a place as sentient before, let alone sentimental, but O’Donohue’s words struck me beautifully and named an experience I was curious to have, without knowing how to rationalize.

As I thought about it I realized that in a really practical way, this place had loved me first, providing me with a foundation from which to rebuild my physical health: miles of paths and buckets of phytoncides, given freely, undeterred by the snobbery of my ancient forest bias.

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With this realization I recognized that there were ways I could show my gratitude in return. If this place loved me, I wanted to make sure it knew I loved it back.

I’d been noticing long strands of invasive ivy, pulled from the furrowed trunks of the fir where it liked to climb, left on the margin of the trail. As spring progressed and the weather improved, more and more ivy was pulled and left in piles and coils on the trailsides and periodically cleared away again.

One day I came across a man, easily well into his eighth decade, dressed in worn work duds and armed with a small hacksaw, cutting down invasive holly saplings on the steep pitch that brings the trail up onto high ground just beyond the cedar grove I visited daily. He nodded as I passed and I thanked him for his efforts.

“I can’t dig ‘em out,” he said in reply, “Roots are too hard and I’m too old. So I come back every few springs and just cut ‘em down again.”

“Wow,” was as much of a response as I could muster.

“Someone’s got to,” he replied, turning back to his work.

Someone has got to, I thought as I walked by, humbled.

Before I left the forest that day I stopped for a few moments trailside to clear a budding network of ivy from an otherwise healthy tangle of Oregon grape and sword fern.

I began to view pulling invasive weeds from the forest as a small token of my appreciation for all it gave me freely. A daily tithe of five minutes of trailside clearing seemed the least I could do. If it’s his job, it’s my job too, I told myself.

Continued next week.

Notes:

1. Thompson, C. W., Roe, J., Aspinall, P., Mitchell, R., Clow, A., Miller, D. More Green Space is Linked to Less Stress in Deprived Communities: Evidence from Salivary Cortisol Patterns. Landscape and Urban Planning. 2012. Accessed on February 3, 2024.

2. Ohtsuka, Y., Yabunaka, N., Takayama, S. (1998). Shinrin-Yoku (Forest-Air Bathing and Walking) Effectively Decreases Blood Glucose Levels in Diabetic Patients.International Journal of Biometeorology. 1998. Accessed on February 3, 2024.

3. Tsunetsugu, Y., Lee, L., Park, B.-J., Tyrväinen, L., Kagawa,T., Miyazaki, Y. Physiological and Psychological Effects of Viewing Urban Forest Landscapes Assessed by Multiple Measurements. Landscape and Urban Planning. 2013. Accessed on February 3, 2024.

4. Kuo, F. E., Taylor, A. F. A Potential Natural Treatment for Attention-Deficit /Hyperactivity Disorder: Evidence From a National Study. American Journal of Public Health. 2004. Accessed on February 3, 2024.

5. Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., Kaplan, Stephen. The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting With Nature. Psychological Science. 2008. Accessed on February 3, 2024.

6. Li, Q. Effect of Forest Bathing Trips on Human Immune Function. Environmental Health and Preventative Medicine. 2010. Accessed on February 3, 2024.

7. Li Q, Kobayashi M, Wakayama Y, Inagaki H, Katsumata M, Hirata Y, Hirata K, Shimizu T, Kawada T, Park BJ, Ohira T, Kagawa T, Miyazaki Y. Effect of Phytoncide from Trees on Human Natural Killer Cell Function.International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology. 2009. Accessed on February 3, 2024.

In the last week it’s rained nearly three inches. Three is not a particularly impressive integer, but it’s 7% of Bainbridge Island’s annual rainfall, all come in a seven day stretch. This island gets its rain in concentrated seasons, winter being the most prolific. And then, one day in early summer, the rain stops and doesn’t start again until the onset of fall. The weeks when we take on inches like this are generally the most extreme expression of winter’s energy here. Just as this week it’s hard to believe that in summer this place is hot, and by its end parched, by the driest weeks of summer the wet we’re experiencing this week will seem unfathomable.

The seasonal stream cutting through the ravine to the north of our house is running this week. This happens only a few times a year, only for a few days at a time, only when we get significant amounts of rain in relatively short timespans. Accompanying this especially wet week are unseasonably high temperatures. As the neighborhood settles into each evening’s silence, with our bedroom window and door open to the warm air, the whispering of the here for now creek and the chorus of the frogs who have come out of their winter slumber to sing alongside it come through.

“Attention is the hidden discipline of familiarity,” writes the poet David Whyte. With this orientation the year has become a succession of enchanting ephemera. This week we arrived at the halfway point in winter, and while much of life’s goings on are hidden from view in its first half, the season’s slow progression is finally becoming visible.

The buds on the trees are getting fatter day by day, signaling an emergence from their annual dormancy into post-dormancy. The onset of darkness in fall cues pre-dormancy in trees, the phase wherein preparations are made for winter. In dormancy, trees remain deeply asleep for what seems to be a genetically programmed duration of time, fixed and generally unaffected by outside conditions. Once this quota is met, sometime around mid winter, trees transition to their post-dormancy phase. The trees at this point are still protected from freezing temperatures, but are getting ready to grow, waiting only on the air to warm [notes 1 + 2].

And the air has warmed just enough for the Indian plum to bloom in the under canopy, the first of the year’s wild blossoms. They caught me by surprise this week, as they do each year, their delicate white flowers bravely cascading from the tips of bare twigs out into the winter air.

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I fell in love ten years ago, and within a few short months, already primed for a move, I left Portland for Bainbridge Island, a compromise between the big city proximity my partner needed and the wildness I craved.

We began exploring our new home immediately. Gazzam Lake Nature Preserve, a 400-acre forested park, was within walking distance of the little cottage we rented and we began familiarizing ourselves with its trails. My standard for wildness had been set by the forest scene I’d left behind in Oregon’s Opal Creek Wilderness. I worked for six years for an environmental education non-profit, Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, that operated out of a private in-holding in the wilderness, comprising a 35,000 acre watershed of old growth and ancient forest. Gazzam Lake paled in a comparison that was never fair.

Through my years of learning with Opal Creek, I knew upon first surveying Gazzam Lake that this forest was second growth and probably third growth in many areas—logged of its old growth at some point, and then, in places, logged again. Absent were old trees and layers in the canopy, two of the characteristics students at Opal Creek learned to look for as signs of forest health and maturity. It seemed though that what Gazzam Lake lacked in canopy layers it made up for in invasive species: English ivy, most predominantly, but also Himalayan blackberry, Scotch broom, and the occasional tangle of English holly.

It was nice to have a nature preserve so close to my new house, but this was not a forest I could love. I felt sure of that immediately.

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“The most consistent predictor of place attachment is the amount of time that an individual has spent in the place. Place attachments do not usually form instantaneously (although this is possible), but tend to strengthen with accumulated positive interactions, and memories that accrue after months and years” [note 3].

By the time I read these words some years later while researching “sense of place” for a piece I was working on, I had a very different relationship with Gazzam Lake. In the intervening years I had begun walking the trails through the preserve daily, initially as a means of recovering from a back surgery I had early one winter.

I’d wake up stiff in the morning and I craved my walk early, to warm and loosen myself. I often arrived at the trailhead at first light, peering into the shadowy tunnel of the path through the trees until it disappeared into nothing.

I walked slowly in the first weeks after surgery, and not too far—one wide loop through the park, less than two miles—on level ground. Once that began to feel easy I added a bit of out and back to Gazzam Lake at the center of the preserve. A spur trail left the main trail and led to the lake’s shore, thick with flora. A small clearing furnished with a worn smooth wood bench and an opening through the tangle provided views of the shallow lake beyond.

Here I would rest for a moment and listen to the chattering of eagles as they surfed thermals high over my head, or the harsh squawk of a heron as it came in to land in the still water of the lake. Reeds stood in thick tufts around its perimeter and rafts of ducks appeared and disappeared in their cover.

I walked these trails daily through that winter’s months and my back recovered quickly. Some days I would wind up and down every length of trail within the preserve, touching the dead end of the road along the water and then turning to climb into the forest again; touching the beach easement at another trail’s terminus and then turning to climb again; down one spur trail through an old tree farm and up another that skirted behind houses that strained for peek-a-boo views of the Salish Sea through the trees. I could easily loop and double back and spend three, four hours at a time in the woods.

I didn’t have the language of place attachment then, I didn’t know, cognitively, that the investments of time I was making in this relationship with Gazzam Lake were strengthening it. I wouldn’t discover the research on place attachment for two more years. But I could feel myself being drawn in.

All at once one day, in a bit of an aha! moment as I paused on the leeward side of a particularly elegant cedar, crouched on my heels with my spine pressed against her trunk to rest my low back, I realized I was falling, had fallen, for this place.

Notes:

Purcell, L. “What Do Trees Do in Winter?” Purdue University, Department of Forestry and Natural Resources. March 2021. Accessed on February 1, 2024. https://www.purdue.edu/fnr/extension/what-do-trees-do-in-the-winter/

Shen, L. “How Do Trees Know When to Wake Up?” Northern Woodlands. January 2011. Accessed on February 1, 2024. https://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/how-do-trees-know-when-to-wake-up#:~:text=And%20because%20the%20post%2Ddormant,trees%20to%20open%20their%20buds.

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

It’s January and the witch hazel, one of my very favorite trees, is in full bloom. My husband Alex and I visited them at the Bloedel Reserve earlier in the month while Bainbridge Island was in the clutch of its annual deep freeze. Bloedel Reserve is a 140 acre estate built by the Bloedel family in the early 1900s that today operates as a non-profit providing “a premier public garden of natural land and designed Pacific Northwest landscapes.” As members, we’ve had the privilege of experiencing the reserve throughout the seasons across a number of years.

This year’s freeze was a little deeper than average: it was fourteen degrees when we buttoned, zipped, wrapped, and cinched ourselves into some of our warmest layers and left the shelter of our car. We were giddy with the absurdity of it.

We saw a sharply dressed man with an expensive camera eyeing the treeline and the clear sky beyond it from his front seat as we crossed the nearly empty parking lot. We didn’t see him again.

The blooming witch hazel greeted us for the first time in the parking lot and again and again throughout our walk.

Twenty minutes in, where a trail ended at a view of the Sound and the North Cascades beyond, we saw another guest, the only one we crossed paths with for the entirety of our visit. “Hearty souls,” she applauded us, eyes sparkling from beneath a knit cap and tightly wrapped scarf. “Lovely day for a walk,” she added, marching by.

A brisk wind blew off the water. The mountains shone with fresh snow. It was not a day to stop and chat. But at the same time, it didn’t feel like a day to miss.

The leaves of the rhododendron were rimed with hoar frost. The ground heaved on elongated ice crystals that collapsed in a satisfying crunch as we walked on them, each footfall sinking an inch or two beyond the brain’s anticipation—tiny, repeated thrills. The splash pools of the miniature falls that tumble along the creek in places from the high bank of the main property to the low bank closer to the salt water froze in beautiful, voluptuous shapes. A trio of yearling deer huddled on a hillock near the teahouse. Impossibly perfect ringed ice filled a small pond dotting the moss garden. It was all so beautiful.

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“We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves,” writes Wintering author Katherine May.

My senses, finely tuned to pleasure, find winter lacking when compared to summer. It’s less sweet, certainly; the animal and insect choruses are largely absent; absent too are the smells of summer—cut grass, the perfume of wild roses along the water; the warmth of sun on bare skin, perhaps my favorite feeling in the world, is hard to come by; and color loses its saturation in winter—everything dulls, even my hair and skin.

“We dream of an equatorial habitat,” writes May, “forever close to the sun, an endless, unvarying high season. But life’s not like that.” May writes about a figurative winter, one that mirrors a literal one in its bleakness, one that inevitably comes and maybe even returns regularly in a life.

Her point being that winter, whether we’re talking literally or figuratively, is hard. It’s natural that we orient toward summer. But, simply put, winter is. “Even if by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck we were able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime,” she writes, “we still couldn’t avoid the winter.”

Learning to live well through winter, then, is a worthwhile pursuit.

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Life needs winter. As I’ve directed my attention toward this understanding my appreciation for the season has grown. Plants require periods of dormancy ahead of growth seasons, time to muster energy and resources, and that dormancy is cued by decreases in light and temperature. There are hibernating animals who essentially do the same, sleeping through the scarcity of winter.

In our modern world we can, by myriad technological advances—HVAC systems, air travel, artificial light, the combination of agriculture, transportation, and refrigeration—essentially bypass winter. But surely the microcosm of life that is a human must too need winter, must also have genetically coded behaviors and adaptations for survival in this season. I’ve been wondering recently what naturally happens to us in winter and what happens when we avoid it.

While the experiment needs repeating to verify its findings, a 2023 sleep study in Berlin mapped participants’ sleep patterns throughout the year to observe seasonal changes. The study demonstrated that our sleep architecture—that is the progression of NREM and REM sleep we cycle through multiple times each night—changes throughout the year and suggests that, as a result, we “adjust sleep habits to season.” Participants in this study, on average, slept an hour more per night in the winter than the summer, including an additional 30 minutes per night in REM sleep [note 1]. REM sleep is requisite for memory formation, emotional processing, and brain development [note 2], and it seems when we’re attuned to the decrease in availability of natural light and the associated increase in sleep opportunity in winter, we get more of it.

A 2014 National Institute of Health paper demonstrated human adaptability to winter—specifically mild cold stress and caloric scarcity—across cultures and history [note 3]. “One might conceptually associate winter's cold, dark, and still environment as a natural balance to summer's warm, bright, and active environment,” write the authors. They note that increased sleep in cool environments without the effects of artificial light “work synergistically to promote the conservation of valuable calories in a time of year when they are naturally scarce.”

The paper goes on to explain a suite of physiological mechanisms known as “longevity genes” that are only activated by the stressors of winter—in this instance what doesn’t kill us truly makes us stronger.

But when you put it all together with the way we live today, it spells disease. The paper links obesity and cardiometabolic diseases with the lack of winter conditions in modern environments:

It appears that we have an evolutionary discordance between our biology that evolved to counter seasonal calorie scarcity and mild cold stress and our modern world of ubiquitous calories and excess warmth…Our 7-million-year evolutionary path was dominated by two seasonal challenges—calorie scarcity and mild cold stress. In the last 0.9 inches of our evolutionary mile, we solved them both…[but] obesity and chronic disease are seen most often in people and the animals (pets) they keep warm and overnourished. Similar to the circadian cycle and like most other living organisms, it is reasonable to believe we also respond to the seasons and carry with us the survival genes for winter. Maybe our problem is that winter never comes.

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I want the kind of attachment to my place that welcomes its winter. I want to experience winter for the presence that it is, not simply the absence of summer.

When I attune my senses to what is here in this season, I find it has a signature all its own: its spices and the delicious ways we combine them to keep us warm; the sound of rain on the metal roof and the canopy beyond, the great horned owl who has taken up residence in the ravine that borders our home and calls to us for hours on end some nights; the scents of aromatic wood fire and the sharpness of cedar; the feeling of striking out in the wet cold, chilled to the bone in seconds but warming slowly as the body, evolved for just such challenges, adapts to the conditions; soothing, monochromatic palettes with infinite variations on the theme winter.

There is, of course, a relationship between experiencing a place throughout the seasons and the depth of attachment available to that place. “Seasonal visitors have a developing yet still weak bond [to place] called a partial sense of place that includes positive feelings without a commitment to stay” [note 4].

“Partial sense of place” is not what I’m after; the quality of place attachment I want to foster in myself is simply not available without a commitment to stay. And since it seems it’s not only a deeper sense of place attachment that winter here gifts me, but also a physiological and emotional resilience, the kind that only comes about by exposure to winter’s stressors, I’m learning to embrace it. There’s a sense of resolution this season invites, an appraisal of the frozen expanse and a confident, “I know how to dress for this.”

Even so, winter has a way of imposing its limitations. Layered as we were, we lasted for only forty minutes on our recent excursion at Bloedel Reserve—by far our briefest visit to date. It may just prove to also be the most memorable.

Notes:

Seidler, A, Weihrich, KS, Bes, F, de Zeeuw, J, Kunz, D. “Seasonality of human sleep: Polysomnographic data of a neuropsychiatric sleep clinic.” Frontiers in Neuroscience. February 17, 2023. Accessed on January 27, 2024. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2023.1105233/full

Summer, J, Singh, A. “REM Sleep Revealed: Enhance Your Sleep Quality.” The Sleep Foundation. Accessed on January 27, 2024. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/stages-of-sleep/rem-sleep#:~:text=REM%20sleep%20is%20characterized%20by,%2C%20brain%20development%2C%20and%20dreaming.

Cronise, RJ, Sinclair, DA, and Bremer, AA. “The ‘Metabolic Winter’ Hypothesis: A Cause of the Current Epidemics of Obesity and Cardiometabolic Disease.” September 1, 2014. National Library of Medicine. Accessed on January 27, 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4209489/

Scannell, L. and R. Gifford. “The Psychology of Place Attachment.” Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice, 5 ed. January 2014. Accessed on January 27, 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279718543_The_psychology_of_place_attachment

I’ve been thinking about migrations. I’m away from home right now on a brief, annual migration of sorts, and it’s left me wondering how to reconcile the fact of animal migrations with the quest for place attachment. Time in place being the primary indicator of place attachment, it serves one, at least in this regard, not to leave. Do I have that right? 

To foundation this line of inquiry I first went in search of a basic understanding of migration that repaid me in delight after delight. For instance, some migrating seabirds, turtles, and amphibians have magnetite (a magnetic, ferrous mineral) integrated in the sensory tissues of their heads which serves to literally pull them along their migratory pathways [note 1]. Also, arctic terns’ ceaseless pursuit of summer leaves them on the wing nearly constantly, covering somewhere in the mind bending range of 25,000-50,000 miles a year, the longest migratory pathway of any animal [note 2]. And perhaps the most illuminating—scientists have identified a gene variation, carried in about 20 percent of people, that seems to make its carriers more adventurous, restless, even, and willing to take risks. This gene might offer an explanation, or part of the explanation, for voluntary migration [note 3]. 

But one inconsistency stuck in my craw and I haven’t been able to work it out in any satisfactory way. It seems migration means two different things: one if you’re talking about the human animal, and another if you’re talking about any other kind of animal. 

When I searched for a simple definition of migration, the first two pages of results were definitions of human migration. The minutiae of these definitions changed from one to the next but ultimately each definition communicated what this one, from the online educational resource Khan Academy, did: “Human migration is the movement of people from one place to another with the intention of settling in the new location” [note 4]. 

The last clause—with the intention of settling in the new location—contrasted sharply with the definition of animal migration, also pulled from an online teaching resource from National Geographic: “Migration is a pattern of behavior in which animals travel from one habitat to another in search of food, better conditions, or reproductive needs. There are two important factors that make migration different from other types of animal movement: first, migration happens seasonally, and second, migration involves a return journey” [note 2]. 

I went back to the Khan lesson defining human migrations. At the end of the lesson, a multiple choice question reinforced the definition of human migration a final time:

Stop and consider: What is human migration? Choose 1 answer:

(Choice A)   Temporary movement that follows seasonal weather patterns

(Choice B)   Movement to a new region with the intent to settle there

(Choice C)   Continuous movement to follow resources

The correct answer being choice B—and more to the point, not choice A or choice C, each of which specifically describes animal migrations. The human migration definition stands alone—movement in one direction with the intention of staying—and in contrast in this one critical way, to animal migration. 

I can’t change the definitions we give to words like migration, so instead I am resolved to pay closer attention. To be vigilant with how I use language and cognizant of these semantic incongruities, the way meanings change as subjects do, and the way they serve as wedges between humans and other forms of life. 

Words are important and language is alive. As a language maker, I feel compelled to examine the ways language serves to perpetuate our separation from nature. It’s this idea—that we’re fundamentally different from and above nature—that leaves us in a crisis of disconnection from our places. They deteriorate as a result, along with our sense of attachment to them and the belonging that comes with it. 

Deconstructing the story starts with deconstructing the language used to tell it. Are we unique, save our peculiar similarities, as different definitions for human migration and animal migration suggest? Or are we the same, save our peculiar uniquenesses? What happens when we start with the assumption of sameness? 

The more I read about the expressions of migrations, the more I fail to see a difference in the reasons for movement, in a single or cyclical direction, across the animal kingdom. Our means of modern migration might be the biggest differentiator between human and other species, but we’re all essentially doing the same thing and for the same reasons; we’re the same, save our peculiar uniquenesses. 

Some humans, like some animals, make annual migrations. Home oriented as I am, I go and return again, each year at this time, in search of favorable, temporal (snow) conditions (for an annual ski trip). I don’t mean to suggest that the luxury of travel that I am now enjoying is owing to some sort of inborn survival instinct and not simply an indicator of privilege; I won’t die if I fail to leave home next year at this time on this trip (although my husband might insist he would). I only mean to point out that this pattern of movement, of leaving one place for the resources to be found in another with the intention of returning again, is something we share across the animal kingdom. 

One way migrations with the intention of settling in the new location, like my own move from the Midwest to the Northwest, also seem to happen across the animal kingdom. Some are aided by physiology, by a genetically coded curiosity, or the function of specialized means of navigation. Changing conditions and resource scarcity pushed humans from the Horn of Africa 60,000 years ago; these same factors influence the dispersal of other animals across the globe. 

Might it have been some inborn instinct that led me home? Some particularity of my physiology that drew me like a magnet to my place? That pushes me from it, from time to time, looking for another experience in another place, but then draws me back again, and quite powerfully, just, it seems, to remind me, and bodily, where my place is? Is the viscerality of homesickness a physiological guarantee that I make my way back again and again? I don’t know, but I love to wonder.

And, as it happens, migrations—that is in the cyclical sense, with a return implied—don’t seem to be contraindicated with a deep sense of place attachment. It seems, in fact, that the act of being away from home long enough to miss it galvanizes a sense of belonging to place [note 5]. Homesickness is an indicator of place attachment and is not felt by people for whom deep attachment to place is not felt.

There is a point at which being away diminishes one’s sense of place attachment. Leaving for an entire season, for instance, would naturally limit one’s sense of place and therefore attachment to it. But we’re migratory animals who have always roamed and homed again; there’s room for me to hold onto home as a tether from which to search for temporary favorable conditions elsewhere, returning again and again to nurture myself in the belonging available in place. Just as there’s room for language to change, to broaden along with our thinking, to let go of its insistence on separating humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Notes:

Lennox, R. J., Chapman, J.M., Souliere, C.M., Tudorache, C., Wikelski, M., Metcalfe, J.D., Cooke, S.J. Conservation physiology of animal migration. February 29, 2016. Accessed on January 20, 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4772791/

National Geographic Society. Nature’s Most Impressive Animal Migrations. Updated October 29, 2023. Accessed on January 20, 2024. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/natures-most-impressive-animal-migrations/

Micalizio, C.S. and S.P. O’Connor. Global Human Journey. National Geographic Society. Updated October 29, 2023. Accessed on January 20, 2024. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/global-human-journey/

Schroeder, S. Causes and Effects of Human Migration. Khan Academy. Accessed on January 20, 2024. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/medieval-times/migration/a/migration-focus-block#:~:text=Human%20migration%20is%20the%20movement,what%20impacts%20their%20movements%20had

Scannell, L. and R. Gifford. “The Psychology of Place Attachment.” Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice, 5 ed. January 2014. Accessed on January 20, 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279718543_The_psychology_of_place_attachment

We—that is the people I come from on all sides—have been on the move for a century, each generation doing their bit to move a little farther in a lifetime, or a lot farther, depending on the circumstances. We’ve moved for all kinds of reasons: refuge, survival, opportunity, community. And here I am. After leaving the place I grew up in and making half a dozen big moves, I find myself here, in a place I would very much like to be from in some substantial way. I’m in love and longing to know this place deeply. To gather my roots about myself, roots that trail across half the country and from there across oceans and continents, and plant them, and nurture them here.

In the late twentieth century, a flush of research concerned itself with the kind of belonging I aspire to now. Scientists called this sense of belonging place attachment. Conceptually, place attachment exists across a spectrum that spans everything from the superficial delight a tourist might feel for an aesthetically pleasing but ultimately foreign landscape, to the kind of deep attachment, or rootedness, that comes from the continuity of cultures living in place for many generations over hundreds and thousands of years and the accumulation of knowledge and degree of intimacy with the land this kind of continuity affords. Being an endeavor of Western science, researchers have quantified rootedness: here, relatively brief human timescales begin to converse with deeper time—they say it takes eight generations for this quality of belonging to develop. 

The subject renders the scientific language used to describe it poetic. Rootedness is a kind of blurring, a belonging so complete that it becomes hard to draw a line between self and environment. The hallmarks of rootedness are a spiritual connection to place, one that informs and comprises one’s entire experience of life. Religions too have holy places, often in the form of discrete buildings. But for the rooted, the entire landscape becomes sacred, every step a prayer.

A pang shot through me upon learning about place attachment. Rootedness is a birthright of indigeneity. I will never be rooted. But I had to wonder—if place attachment exists on a spectrum, as I learned, what of belonging elsewhere on that spectrum? Can I move myself in the direction of belonging in the way I ache for? Belong is a verb, so how do I do it? I can’t make up for all the time I haven’t been here, and all the time no one in my lineage has been here, but might intention, the other ingredient necessary for a strong sense of place attachment, be a catalyst for a depth of connection otherwise temporally out of reach?

I’ve held these questions and carried them with me on trails through the woods and into the mountains for some years now, every step a prayer. I offer them to the landscape, a love song to the Salish Sea, the shining island on which I live, the Olympic and Cascade ranges that rise around me on all sides. I’ve carefully gathered my trailing roots, transplanted and transplanted and transplanted, and planted them once again, and finally, so they might continue their journey in a different dimension—not across and over, but down and into the earth, understanding that at best I can hope for a mere seventy years in this place. Their tips, in deep time scales, have rested on the soil’s surface just moments, but I feel them searching, looking for purchase in the dense ground. 

What sense of belonging might intention yield? A significant one, I’m learning. And not only a sense of belonging, it turns out, but one of hope, too. Our places the world over are beleaguered to the point of ecological collapse just as it seems we’re collectively waking up to the reality of our shared fate with all of life. The ecological despair we all carry as a result, whether consciously or not, finds expression in our bodies and our psyches and by extension our societies. But time plus intention in place develops place attachment, and place attachment changes us. 

“One of place attachment’s key behavioral outcomes is stewardship,” writes Professors Scannell and Gifford, authors of the textbook Environmental Psychology. “People who have a strong environmental identity and define themselves as part of nature are more likely to report engaging in pro-environmental behavior.” Despite the dry language, herein lies the promise of actively belonging ourselves to place—that a sense of place attachment will engender acts of nurturing the land and the community of life, ourselves included, that it sustains. We play the leading role in the ecological decline gaining momentum across the earth, and so we have an obligation to even greater impact in roles of ecological regeneration. Place attachment is a doorway in.

How can I make myself into a fiber and offer myself to the weft of this place, woven and felted and in the end no longer able to describe myself without first referencing the place in which I’m held? This is my exploration here. Here on the page and here where I live in deep gratitude on an island in the Salish Sea, where the Suquamish and Duwamish peoples have been rooted for many generations and centuries, caring for and being cared for by this place.