There’s an atmospheric river flowing toward Western Washington that’s left me wondering what it must’ve been like to live in a time before meteorology. To just wake up and deal with whatever was. To not “see” weather coming save the observable hints the atmospheric conditions gave.

“A ring around the moon, rain is coming soon.” A condition created by cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere, the kind that presage low pressure systems by a day or two.

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor’s take warning.” Red skies signify high pressure systems – or stable weather. In places where the predominant winds move from west to east (as they do here in Washington), a red sky in the west means that stable weather is inbound. When the red sky appears in the east, it’s being pushed out ahead of an unstable system coming in from the west.

Both adages are true enough some of the time, much like a ten day forecast. 

Have I always thought of the weather as something requiring my approval rather than my acceptance?

Years ago, when my relationship to rain began to feel adversarial, as if this place itself was trying to chase me away, my therapist challenged me to delete the weather app from my phone. 

“Just stop looking at it,” she said. “You do with the weather what you do with your days – reduce it to its worst moment and characterize the entire experience by that moment. You don’t need more practice at this. What if you just had to deal with the weather that came, day by day?”

She didn’t deny the effect weather had on me. She only pointed out that that effect was quite enough. I didn’t need the added distress of anxious anticipation. 

She was right, of course. With few exceptions, the icon paired with a day’s forecast doesn’t characterize the entire day. Not to mention that having an opinion about something that is both in the future and entirely out of my control doesn’t benefit me in any way. 

The weather app was a tool I had weaponized against myself. Facing the weather I found day by day forced me to cut to the acceptance and the practical considerations of going out in it. 

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There are things I have to remember at the beginning of the rainy season.

No rain, no rainbows. But also no rainforests (or forests, period), mushrooms, aquifer replenishment, healthy salmon runs.

I could go on. And should, probably, in the moments when I find myself discontent with what is. As if rain is anything but a blessing in a drought year – Western Washington’s third driest in the last thirty. 

An atmospheric river can do harm though, it has to be said. Atmospheric rivers are exactly what they sound like, only the water in them is in the form of vapor. They can be massive – larger by volume than the Amazon River. High and low pressure systems channel them. 

The term was coined in the 90s as the phenomenon picked up regularity and severity. In 2019, a rating system for atmospheric rivers was established. The system ranks these events on a scale from one to five – from mostly beneficial to mostly hazardous. Atmospheric rivers can cause flooding and landslides, particularly when they come on the tail end of an outsized wildfire season. 

At the top of the USDA’s Climate Hub page defining atmospheric rivers there’s a mental health statement – “Here at the Northwest Climate Hub, we recognize that extreme weather events and effects of climate change may have caused damage or distress to many of our readers. Reading about extreme weather events may be triggering, so if you are suffering from mental health impacts because of climate change, please reach out to the Disaster Distress Helpline.”

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If pain exists in the delta between what is and what we can accept, what now in an era of climate disaster? Does radical weather require radical acceptance?

My hunch is that cutting to acceptance is always beneficial, even when faced with objectively wretched weather, even when faced with escalating natural disasters. I’d venture a guess that to really belong to a place – to recognize and live from a place of interconnectedness with the land and all its features and inhabitants – requires a foundation of unreserved acceptance. 

It’s all the rage to rage these days. I’m not feeling it. If climate change requires action on my part (and it does) I’d rather see what I can get done when I set my reactivity aside. 

My relationship to rain has changed dramatically over the years. The weather app is no longer triggering. I use it to time my walks for the rain showers, when the woods empty out of everyone who might call such conditions “bad weather.”

It’s been a wet one by recent early autumnal metrics, a banner year for chanterelles. Each wave of rain and streak of humidity pushes a new round up through the loam, and Alex and I have made a sport of seeing how many new patches we can identify while the conditions are prime. 

A week ago we found such a new spot, one that was so good that it left our baskets spilling over with more than half of what we found left on the ground. We dropped pins on our Google maps and named them clever/nerdy things like “Watch Your Step!” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” 

We buried our noses in our baskets and huffed their aroma. Earthy and sweet feel too flat as descriptors. Nothing else smells like a basket of fresh chanterelles. They defy description. “This is what the color orange smells like to me,” Alex said between huffs, which might be as close as one can get. 

Chanterelles, because of their flavor and proliferation, are an easy favorite. They’re distinct, easy to spot, easy to learn. I wandered through the same forest several days later. The day was drawing to a close, but I was with a friend new to mushroom hunting who was eager to use every minute of daylight left to us. I talked through my process as we walked. 

When we first entered the forest, the trees were all of one species and tightly packed together. They were so dense nothing was growing on the forest floor. There might be some fungal growth in that soil, but safe to say, it wasn’t teeming with life. These weren’t the conditions we were looking for.

Once we entered a stand of trees that was more diverse in age and species, I slowed down and began paying more attention. I was looking for stands of trees that included somewhat mature fir. The base of a big fir tree is a great place to start looking for chanterelles. They like loamy, light soil, and are often found in brambles of evergreen huckleberries, or under the drooping arms and legs of salal. Any semi-open, semi-maturely treed hillside is worth looking at carefully.

With this information I followed him around, watching him pick up every mushroom he saw initially, until he found the prize we were after. We examined the chanterelle carefully, its rudimentary gills, its firm stalk, its velvety cap, the blurred distinction between the two. 

We examined the false chanterelle. They’re convincing from above, and they grow in the same places in which true chanterelles are found. But the cap is slimy and lacks the velvety quality of the chanterelle, and if you’re looking carefully has a faint bullseye marking. The false chanterelle’s underside has distinct, deep gills. With a chanterelle in his basket and a side by side comparison with a false chanterelle under his belt his eye was honed.

In forty five minutes of focused attention on one area, he’d amassed a beautiful handful. We reoriented ourselves and made our way back to the trail, continuing on its loop toward the park’s entrance. 

The trail made a wide circle and gradually came into hillier terrain. We slowed again and I began looking upslope, squinting in the gathering dusk for the telltale flares. We had intended on being done for the day, but these conditions looked too good to pass up. We scrambled off trail again, climbing the duffy hillside. 

I saw the stumps of my three days previous harvest just as I heard my friend shout, “Hey! These are great!” We’d found our way to the same slope Alex and I had just filled up on. I caught up to him and told him as much, pointing out the remnants of the mushrooms we’d harvested already. 

“We left a lot behind though,” I said. “We’d filled our baskets and run out of time, so there’s a lot here still. And there’s a lot of area we didn’t even get to explore if you just keep wandering up this hill.”

We did that, fanning out on the slope, slowly working our way up. I tunneled into leggy hucks and carefully stepped through patches of blowdown. I harvested armfulls in wide arcs around my body. The abundance was unbelievable. 

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy.” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words come to me every time I find myself harvesting bounty like this. Especially here in this forest – a patchwork quilt of paltry second and third growth, choked on its margins with invasive species and plagued by unhealthy density. Even so, when given a chance (and a few dousings), this degraded patch of earth erupts in chanterelles each fall.

I heard my friend hoot with glee from the short distance between us. These were the best conditions one could hope for on a first foray into the woods for chanterelles, and he was duly delighted. 

My basket filled quickly. I kept adding more, wiggling it to settle them in place and create room. When that stopped working, I began mounding them. I was still leaving most of what I was finding behind. 

We spent the week giving mushrooms away. To the friend of a neighbor who gifted us a huge cedar tree; to the friends who invited us for a dinner sail on Puget Sound from Eagle Harbor one bright, crisp day; to the new friend and neighbor who is generously sharing his mill and trailer with us; to the friend who sat at our kitchen table chatting with me while I dry sautéed the remaining fifteen pounds of chanterelles over the course of five hours one evening. 

It’s rained again since and I’m ready to head out once more. Autumn’s woodland ephemerals are having a super bloom year. 

(May these same conditions nourish a super bloom in us all.)

David Kotz is a one man island institution. For years he was the town sawyer, the guy with the mill who loved every tree he met. He was who one called when, for instance, a fifty inch diameter madrona fell across one’s driveway in a heavy storm, as happened when I was employed by Dave as a woodworker in the custom furniture shop that grew from his sawyering business.

We arrived on site together that St. Patrick’s Day morning eight years ago – Dave to buck the behemoth into chunks small enough to hoist onto his flatbed, me to document the process for our social media page. He rigged thick yellow webbing around the tree and, with the boom arm on his flatbed, put it under tension. Using a thirty inch Stihl chainsaw he made a pair of perfectly aligned cuts that severed the trunk from its rootwad. Another pair of cuts ten feet or so up the tree’s length left the bulk of the trunk dangling from the boom arm. He carefully swung the ten foot length around and into the bed of his truck and off it went to the mill. 

I asked Dave recently how he became this guy, and if he could name the ethic that shaped his business through which local wood that came or had to come down – like the St. Patrick’s Day madrona – was celebrated. I asked him if he considered himself a woodworker, a sawyer, or a forester, or if he could even choose one. 

“Yeah, probably all three,” he said. “I guess there’s one thing that’s becoming more and more clear to me everyday is that – I don’t know if I would say it’s part of the problem, but it’s a thing we humans do – we break things down to one category and try to do one thing. And our world doesn’t work that way! If you look around you, it’s a web of so many things coming together. That’s what’s important and how things should run.

“I get myself in trouble for that because I’m doing a hundred and one things and I can’t manage them all, and yet there is a beauty to having my web be big, and having a lot of tendrils out. It supports me, and I think it supports our community too.”

It does. It’s hard to have a conversation about farms, trees, woodworking, milling, or forestry on Bainbridge Island without Dave’s name coming up. Not only does everyone know him, but everyone considers him a friend and has a story about the time he came to help out with their once-in-a-lifetime tree project. 

Dave’s parents moved to Bainbridge Island, to the land where Dave still lives with his family, in 1962, the year before he was born. The circumstances on and surrounding this land began shaping the person Dave is today.

“Probably one of the biggest things that happened for me was that directly to the south of my property there was a gentleman who bought a twenty acre piece there, and moved in when I was about eight and built a house. I loved building, and after the guys had left for the day I’d go examine all the framing and climb all over the whole thing. 

“And then in my later teens, the gentleman that moved in there and his wife hired me to help them manage the property. They had a bunch of it in forest management. 

“At that time the management was to remove the deciduous and plant the coniferous. This has obviously changed a lot, but I would cut down alder, and I got to work with wood in that way – cutting trees down, cutting them up. 

“And when you split firewood, all day long all you do is open up wood and see the beauty of the color and the grain of it. And sometimes that grain doesn’t want to split! But it’s a beautiful thing.”

Dave kept at it, making a close friend in high school who shared his love of hard work and building projects. “It’s just something I gravitated toward. We used to just go and do a lot of jobs, we worked a lot, and some of those were clearing, cutting wood. We’d find old logs and just figure out how to get them to the truck.

“There was a guy, Dorsey was his name, out in Port Madison that had an old sawmill out there, a circular sawmill, and we’d take our logs. He was this ancient guy, just tottering around running this huge sawmill. We got him milling stuff for us and then we’d build things out of it.”

Dave began farming the land he grew up on with a group of friends at about the same time he bought his first sawmill. The farm got its organic certification, and Dave began learning about soil health and composting, all of which, he said, “was a great thing, but I realized really quickly that I was too interested in wood to do only farming.” 

The collaboration dissolved after a couple years, but he referenced an aerial photo of Coyote Farm in its heyday. “In the picture you can see the foot of a helicopter,” he told me – his friend and helicopter pilot Virginia Pell snapped the shot – “and how much land we had opened in tillage. We’re still working quite a bit of it. I have a large garden, and a large orchard, and we’re getting into mushrooms now.”

One of the many and varied directions Dave’s love of trees has taken him is on his most recent foray into mushroom growing. “I’ve actually been loving it, in that it’s almost like the missing piece,” Dave enthused. “Because in woodworking, you’re just thinking of the trees as something you take something out of to make wood projects, but the mycelium piece is the missing piece. The spalting, which you know all about. And also using the whole tree, too.”

Spalting refers to the patterning wood takes on when it’s been infested by certain fungi. The fungus will affect one ring at a time, leaving delicate ink-black lines throughout an otherwise intact piece of wood. If the spalting is caught before it decomposes the wood too much, the effect is striking. The same tree unharvested will eventually be entirely decomposed by this fungus – this is one of the processes by which a forest maintains itself.

Dave has been growing shiitake, lion’s mane, and three kinds of oysters in a small shop he converted into an indoor growing space on his property. “It’s challenging! It’s funny, because it’s super simple, and yet it can be quite challenging. Getting everything just right – the moisture and the CO2 and the heat and the light – all the factors you have to monitor and adjust and tweak. [We] grow the cultures and inoculate the grain bags. So it’s like a whole new part of working with wood, if you will.”

I appreciate Dave’s sense of somehow having come full circle in a lifetime of working with wood by growing mushrooms. I've always imagined him as someone who lives close to nature in that way – in an active relationship, part of the processes that surround him. He was among the first people that came to mind when I started thinking about who I should talk to on the subject of place attachment. Maybe it’s his refusal to call himself any one thing or focus in any one area – his insistence that a life can’t be both full and narrowly focused – combined with where he ends up applying that focus: local forest health, running a farm, and for years, operating a sawmill. 

He’s been watching the trees on Bainbridge for sixty years and has witnessed an overall decline in forest health in that time: “I can say what I think it is, I can’t say if I’m 100% correct or not, but I think the lushness, the density of fir trees – that’s the one I’ll start with – they’re so much more sparse, and their foliage is so much thinner. They don’t have the vibrancy and strength they used to have, I feel,” reported Dave when I pressed him on the subject.

“There are a lot of fir trees, cedar trees too, that are dying. Trees always die, that happens, but I think it’s more. And it’s not only whole trees, but you’ll see firs that have lost all the needles on a limb here and there.” He tried to fit this decline into a context that made sense. “I’m not surprised, because of what I’ve just said. I’ve been thinking a lot about human impacts. I mean, people who don’t believe global warming is caused by human activity, I mean, think about any other creature, what their carbon footprint is – just about nothing! And we cause – number one there’s just so many of us, and number two we do so much – how can we not be huge contributors?”

We ventured into invasive species removal, the new complication of fire in our otherwise generally wet forests, forestry management, and all the little chores that come along with caring for a place. We talked through the highlights from his years of harvesting trees – a pair of diseased elms with beautiful birdseye figuring from Bloedel Reserve; a forty inch walnut in Seward Park that mysteriously died over a winter and had to be milled in place. We talked about the jobs that have been most rewarding – the lumber package that built the Heyday Farms barn and much of the furniture in it. As we talked I kept circling back toward the idea of place attachment. I wanted to understand what had informed his particular way of being in this world and how he felt about this place.

“That’s a very good question,” he said, thoughtfully, “I’m not sure I have a good answer, I think, I mean, it’s just some sense of direction that I think that I have.

“I don’t necessarily feel attached to my property,” he continued, addressing the subject directly. “I have lived on it my entire life. But it isn’t that I’m attached to that property so much as I do enjoy taking care of it while I’m there. 

“But we talk about the fact that we may move somewhere else, and that doesn’t necessarily tear me apart. I do love the place, and I do love taking care of it, and I do love that I’ve been there, that I’ve gotten to raise my kids there. It’s all a beautiful thing. 

“But for me there’s something that trumps that, and it’s about taking care of the place we’re at, and carrying with one one’s sense of place, and recognizing that every place we go is important and needs to be taken care of.”

Autumn in Three Parts

Part I:

We woke a couple hours before sunrise in our camper where we’d slept to get an early start, tucked into the elbow of the forest road accessing our trailhead. We made coffee and dressed in layers and struck out at first light for a pass that lay a little over nine gentle miles up a dense drainage: our favorite trail in the Olympics. 

We passed through a burn scar where leggy rhododendrons held onto copper-colored spent blooms. We traversed a couple rock slides, the trail through which had been improved considerably since last year’s walk here. We entered an older section of forest where the floor was as green as the canopy and speckled with mushrooms. We slowed down.

Our first venture up this trail was a day I’ll never forget. We found a bear’s head mushroom – a toothed fungus related to lion’s mane, named for its size potential and among if not my very favorite forest food – that filled our daypack; we accessed a favorite high point in the northeast corner of the range from an entirely new direction; we saw a cougar – my first and only wild mountain lion spotting – on our drive out.

Since then we’ve gone each year. We check the bear’s head spot, which produces annually though we’ve never again timed it right. And then we climb. Long switchbacks gain the western slope of the draw and the view alternates between a forested valley gently falling away toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north and the crags, peaks, and saddles of the Olympics towering to the south. 

This time around the air was thick with suspended moisture, just shy of having the density necessary to fall as rain. Everything, including us from the knees down, was soaked. The violet bells of gentian, the last of these mountains’ wildflowers, hung heavy in the thick dew. 

There was an upward momentum to the heavy air. A bright sun shone on the other side of the thick, wet layer hugging the mountains and gently began lifting it. The trees, having taken their fill, released moisture from their stomata as transpiration. We watched it curl up the opposite side of the canyon and disperse on the winds that struck it as it crested the ridgeline.

We climbed and climbed. The clouds parted and closed again. The sun shone on their far side, adamant that there were still some days left in summer. But we could feel that autumn had arrived already, three weeks early despite the calendar’s claims, despite the sun’s position in the sky.

Part II:

The harvest moon is up and the animals know what to do. 

Two weeks ago, from the saddle of Mt. Pilchuck in Washington’s North Cascades, Alex and I spotted a black bear gorging on blueberries three hundred feet below us. We watched her dark mass for a long moment before she moved, confirming our suspicions. (Our hopes, really – because seeing a bear on a hike is about the best thing you can hope for. When she’s at a very comfortable distance and happily eating her fill, it’s an especially nice experience.) 

The bushes were laden and the bear moved slowly through them. I imagined what this all might look like up close: her pushing her snoot through the foliage, past poking twigs, reaching for dark clusters with lips curled back, jaw opened just enough, using her teeth to strip the berries from the bush. Was she drooling? Was she in a mountain blueberry induced euphoria? Yes, by the looks of it. Following her lead, we ate our fill all the way down the mountain.

At home later that week, I sat outside on a cedar round and picked a pint of huckleberries. Maple, my dog, sat next to me watching as I dropped each tiny orb into the repurposed gelato container held between my knees. 

“I’m not giving you any of my huckleberries,” I said to her, matter of factly. Her eyebrows rose and fell in expectation and disappointment. But these berries are tiny and picked one at a time from between the others that are still green or already past their prime. 

“It’ll take me an hour to fill this,” I told her, rattling my plastic pint container, the bottom barely covered in a single layer of berries. She looked hopeful at the gesture but then confused when I relodged the container between my knees. 

I held a branch tip covered in shiny, nearly-black berries out to her. “Here,” I said, inclining my head toward her invitationally. She reached for the dark cluster with lips curled back, jaw opened just enough, and, using her teeth, she stripped the berries from the bush. 

She’s only three, but so far I’ve had to remind her she can pick her own berries annually. “Snack bushes,” I said to her, again and again, hoping the concept sticks this year. 

For the next hour while I filled my pint, Maple filled her belly. When she tipped her head sideways to find an optimal angle of entry between poking twigs, drool spilled out. 

But it’s not only the large predators out eating autumn’s bounty. The fir cones have opened and the birds have descended. We listened to them from my sister’s front yard on the first day of autumn, happily chattering while eating their fill of the protein and fat rich seeds encased in each armored scale. Flecks of dismembered cones floated toward the ground on humid air.

The squirrels, too, are at it. Each morning for the past week or so, the remains of a freshly deseeded cone, or two, or three, have been left on a stump Alex uses to split firewood. Similar piles are littered around on every available surface.

It’s nearly Fat Bear Week, which means it’s nearly Fat Squirrel Week – our spin-off event hosted here at home. Hazel wins every year, both because she’s stripped her namesake of every last nut, and because we now refer to every squirrel as Hazel. I’d be willing to bet, between the nuts and the fir cone seeds, that our resident squirrels are capable of doubling their weight in the glut of each autumn.

There’s something about the human pace. Is it the soul’s pace, too? Am I my whole-est, holiest self when I move as an animal through a wild place? What space is created by a three mile an hour pace? What are my senses capable of when I’m moving slowly?

On foot in the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness I knew that I needed my senses to be fully operational. Moving through severely burned terrain required a quality of vigilance. My eyes were trained to the trail. “Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world,” writes Rebecca Solnit. While my mind certainly wandered farther than my feet did that week, there were times when the two had to be in lockstep. At times each footfall mattered, the consequences of a misstep high. 

Sight wasn’t the only sense critical to me that week. Nothing rocketed my attention back to the present moment in the Frank Church like the tail of a rattlesnake, warning me off. Often, I was just hearing grasshoppers, who swarmed the trail where it crossed scree slopes in choruses capable of drowning out any forewarning a rattlesnake might attempt to make. Other times I was hearing a single grasshopper moving through or somehow entangled in dry grass – a particularly compelling imitation. On three occasions, I heard rattlesnakes. Twice from comfortable distances of about ten feet. 

In Becoming Animal, David Abram writes of a quality of being, “a language that stirs a new humility in relation to other earthborn beings.” Once, when the trail hugged the canyon wall and I had nowhere to redirect my path, I was forced to pass a rattlesnake with barely any margin at all. I knew that the capacity for harm between us went both ways. I knew morality wasn’t a thing out here, but mortality was. I knew that, where I was concerned, this snake wanted nothing but to be left alone. I shook in my animal body still, as was reasonable, and felt very alive on the far side of that encounter.

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It occurred to me in moments out in the Frank Church when my mind felt safe enough to wander a bit off-trail, that the places to which I feel the most attachment are not necessarily the places I’ve lived the longest, but the places in which I’ve walked the most. That place attachment, for me, has been an outcome of connecting in this particular way: moving through a wild landscape like an animal, merging the capacities of mind and body and focusing them on a single task – getting from one place to the next. Experience is deepened by the demand of my full attention in environments that require all of me to be there and nowhere else. These are the places my heart pulls me to again and again. This is the quality of being that feels right to me.

On my last full day of hiking that week, the Middle Fork Trail entered what I now think of as its adventure miles. I wasn’t within a short hike of any of the ranch inholdings responsible for most of the trail’s usage, and, for this one stretch, the trail ran on both sides of the river, halving the traffic on each side.

The topography, along with the ecosystem, had been changing around me since day two. The high-montane conifer forest ecoregion I began in – much of it burned, but much of it forested still in a variety of pine and fir trees, and gently tending downhill – was transitioning. I watched the forests slowly give way to the dry canyon ecoregion, dominated by sparse ponderosa and sagebrush and the spires and rocky headlands that make the Middle Fork the third deepest river canyon in the country. 

On this particular day my usually well-delineated trail dispersed in a scattershot of animal trails at the base of each headland I came to. I repeatedly took what looked to be the most direct route up and over; I was repeatedly wrong about my route of choice having been made by and for bipedal animals such as myself. I cliffed-out three times and found myself hundreds of feet above the river, a sheer drop between us. Lacking the nimbleness and the fearlessness of the bighorn sheep – who, by the looks of their prints and other leave-behinds were the only animals to ever visit these heights – I slid back down the scree slopes I’d just climbed and tried again. 

Each time, I found that the trail took a wide arc inland, gaining and losing minimal elevation in the process. Such is the shape the elements have given this place. Were I inclined to constantly check my progress by referencing a little blue dot on a downloaded map, I might’ve saved myself a handful of adventure miles that day. But for a few moments, I had a bighorn sheep’s vantage of the river and wilderness. By the time I was soaking in Loon Creek hot springs later that night, I was pleased with the whole day, diversions and cliff-outs included.

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This was my second trip into the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness to raft the Middle Fork. Two visits; three weeks total; .1% of my life. I can’t claim any kind of serious attachment to this place. I understand, however, that the investment of emotions and experiences in a place is the how of place attachment. When I go places, I can behave in certain ways that deepen the experience available to me. I can, with the use of my attention and my ability to just be a sensing animal, begin to guess at what an attachment to that place might feel like.

“All of the more than 850 miles of trail described in detail have been hiked by the author,” Margaret Fuller writes of herself in the third person in her introduction to Trails of the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness. She doesn’t appear again, obliquely or explicitly, in the pages of her book, but I thought about her a lot as I made my way down the Middle Fork Trail. 

“Margaret’s…knowledge of Frank Church Wilderness trails, acquired through decades of hiking and exploration in the remote, rugged landscapes of the Frank has always impressed me. This is the most comprehensive collection of information on hiking trails in the Frank Church Wilderness you will find,” reads the guidebook’s forward written by Sally Ferguson, Executive Director of the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation. 

Ferguson later writes, “A trail provides an opportunity for us to see ourselves as a momentary part of the wilderness.” I can’t help but wonder what Margaret Fuller, thousands of miles into her relationship with the Frank Church, might say to that in response. 

“Walking returns the body to its original limits again, to something supple, sensitive, and vulnerable,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Depth of relationship available and degree of vulnerability braved are certainly correlated elsewhere in life; maybe it’s that vulnerability that makes walking such a powerful way of getting to know a place. 

And might the next logical step be true as well? If walking reminds me of my animal nature and attaches me to place, I wonder if simply remembering my animal nature attaches me to place? I wonder if the places to which I have the strongest attachments are the ones that have somehow drawn on my instinctual, animal self in powerful ways?

I wonder how Fuller sees herself when she’s out in the Frank Church. Is she a momentary part of the wilderness? Or has she returned there again and again, walked the river’s edge and scaled its crags, because she senses she’s not? When she leaves only to be pulled back again – to hike the same miles she’s hiked before, perhaps in a different season, under different skies – I wonder if she’s wondered or guessed at what it is doing the pulling.

Walking returns the body to its original limits again, to something supple, sensitive, and vulnerable… Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

I walked along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River for five days in August. My best friend and many times adventure partner Alana was getting married, and she and her now husband Cailin had chosen to do so on day two of a week-long rafting trip. 

The Middle Fork of the Salmon River is a designated Scenic and Wild River, undammed, and flowing through the heart of the largest wilderness area in the continental US at 2.3 million acres. Along its hundred and four miles the Middle Fork boasts over 100 class III and IV rapids, clusters of hot springs, and abundant wildlife, making it a bucket list destination for rafters; the chances of hitting the jackpot on the Middle Fork are less than 2%.

A strange choice then, maybe, to move through the Frank Church — River of No Return Wilderness on foot. But I’ve been enchanted by the magic of the human pace, and I felt drawn to walk the river’s margin alone rather than navigate its channel with my cohort. With a map and Margaret Fuller’s Trails of the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness, I set off down-river on foot.

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My increasing realization of the depth of experience available in a place has left me dissatisfied going anywhere without some foundational knowledge; I’d spent the week before our trip binge-learning as much as I could about the Frank Church. 

I learned that the Sheepeater, a clan of the Shoshone Tribe, were the first peoples of this place. They were nomadic and hunted the Middle Fork canyon in the summer months, leaving behind records of their success in red ochre on the river corridor’s overhanging rock walls. 

I learned that the geography of this place has been shaped over hundreds of millions of years. It was once a seabed, uplifted tectonically, then pocked with volcanoes that erupted continuously for three million years. Since then glaciers and other erosive forces have scraped much of the thin, granitic crust away, revealing the hardened magmatic formations below: the Idaho batholith. Its topography is dramatic with elevations ranging from 1,400 – 11,000 feet; the Middle Fork is the third deepest river canyon in the United States; only Hell’s Canyon and the main stem of the Salmon River are deeper.

I learned that, given the expansiveness of the Frank Church Wilderness, it was critical habitat for many of the state’s species of greatest conservation need, including the fisher, the wolverine, and the wilderness’ iconic species, the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep. 

Until I arrived on site, this was all just disembodied information. I knew what I didn’t know on day one of my walk, and that was just about everything. My experience of feeling so at home at home – really knowing my surroundings – clarifies just how not at home I am when I leave. But I also knew my experience was only limited by my curiosity, and my curiosity was boundless. I hit the trail with the intention of getting to know the Middle Fork corridor as deeply as I could in the week of time I had to spend there. 

While I could identify several others, I was familiar with only one tree species upon setting out, the Douglas fir, and even it seemed different somehow. For good reason, I learned, when at the end of my first day hiking I mentioned it to my friend and fellow river companion Rob, a river ecologist from Boise.

“The Douglas fir here are different from what you’re used to,” Rob confirmed. These are mountain Douglas fir, which are smaller overall. In Western Washington you have coastal Douglas fir, which grow in more nutrient rich soil with more precipitation and therefore get much larger.”

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“Some side creeks are dangerous, but the most dangerous are bridged,” wrote Fuller in her description of the first length of trail I walked. I re-read her words while standing on the burnt out piling of a bridge on the nearside of a boisterous creek. 

She’d warned me in her revised introduction, “There have been so many fires since the second edition of this book came out in 2003, I have made no attempt to locate or name them. You should expect to see some burned trees or logs wherever you go in this wilderness… the trails will not be in pre-fire condition.”

The low water conditions that stymied the progress of my friends on the river afforded me safe crossing at every burned bridge and unbridged creek on day one. I followed their slow progress on the walkie-talkie I’d been assigned as I picked my way along the shore. 

The trail was sometimes hard to follow – overgrown with only the faintest suggestion of a prescribed route. Much of it is underwater in high water conditions, thick, tall grasses disappearing the trail entirely. 

In one such section the trail ended abruptly at a small pond’s edge. I could see a shadow suggesting its continuation on the far side, maybe 12 feet away. Between these two points was only water and a collection of debris that took me a long moment to organize into a beaver’s dam.

I tested it out with one foot. It felt surprisingly solid despite its humble materials. I scampered across as lightly as I could, feeling no give and sensing no disturbance underfoot. I laughed out loud on the far side, totally surprised by delight.

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When I arrived in camp, Rob presented me with a small bouquet of plant specimens he’d collected throughout the day to continue my education on the riparian plant life of the upper Middle Fork into the evening. 

I’d learned that the granitic soils that dusted the batholith were thin and low in nutrients, making them especially susceptible to erosion. Rob confirmed this by underlining the importance of the riparian shrubbery he presented me with to the stability of the riverbank: Geyer’s willow, syringa, serviceberry, alder. He’d also collected a strand of western virgin’s bower and a sprig of wild rose, complete with crimson rosehip, which, along with the syringa I had to imagine in bloom. 

We talked into the darkness about the features of the environment I had and would come across. We ventured into the reasons why each of us cared about what was out there, though that was harder to name. I went to bed that night blown away by the good fortune I’d had and the good company I’d kept that day – plant, human and otherwise.

Continued next week.

Rain in August. Something I didn’t hope for in a drought year. One point six inches – twice the monthly average – in what is usually our second driest month of the year. An August wetter than our June. An August wetter than our May, even. 

And so, on the tail end of a lingering COVID case, my COVID cohort and I struck out on a cool Saturday morning for our favorite chanterelle patch, wondering if there was any chance.

Nine years ago, when we first stumbled into what we now lovingly refer to as Chantitown I couldn’t shake the sense of being in a dream. The cool, still air. The moss draped cedar limbs. The slope of the land, the softness of the duff, the pleasing plunge of the heel on every downhill step.

And the orange blooms of chanterelles. Some delicately ruffled at their caps’ margins. Some fused in clumps of three and four. Some the size of a hand, fingers outstretched. Some even larger. Everywhere. 

As a child I had recurring dreams of finding myself in such circumstances – in a field of wildflowers, for instance, and once at a peacock farm, feathers everywhere – where the abundance of beauty was overwhelming and I was free, welcomed even, to gather to my heart’s content. 

At first a mania sets in. The gathering is fast and arms, bags, baskets fill quickly. But after a short while an astonishment takes over. The need, great as it was, is met so completely that urgency only shortens the experience. An ease settles in. And a delight. 

I’m learning to cut to this ease.

This time around, my fever – my lone symptom – helped me get there. We wandered slowly off the trail toward the pockets, folds, and slopes of Chantitown. Surely not, I thought to myself, tempering my own expectations. But then there they were. Little orange buttons, unmistakable against the dark earth. 

The farther off the trail we wandered, the more we found. And not just buttons (which we quickly realized we could leave to grow more) but lovely, fresh, caps and blooms. Not the largest we’ve found in this spot, but firm and bright and abundant. In August.

We’d come prepared with baskets, but we’d forgotten our knives. As the extent of the harvest available became apparent, I thought of a story I’d heard in church as a girl. A village in distress, a crop killing drought. A call to prayer to which everyone showed, but just one of these supplicants, a child, showed up with an umbrella. 

We pinched the firm stalks with our fingertips and made do. We filled our basket with enough mushrooms for one big dinner and left the rest for others in the hopes that they will do the same for us later in the season when they are first on arrival to such a bounty.

Then we stumbled back out of the cool, dense trees into the clearcut margins of these woods and filled another basket with blackberries, relishing the overlap of this twin harvest, usually separated by months. 

It was a Tuesday or Wednesday – one of those insipid days from which I generally do not expect greatness – and Alex and I found ourselves out for our evening waddle. The waddle was our summer tradition in the years we lived near the edge of the sea. About thirty or forty minutes before the sun was due to set, we left home on foot and scrambled down our steep gravel drive. Across the road and shared by the same six homes that shared our drive was a gap in a blackberry and wild rose hedge and a set of crude stairs down to a rocky beach. From here we assessed the evening’s conditions. If the water was unwelcoming, we’d walk the length of the road for as long as it ran right along the water. Twenty minutes down and back again in one direction, twenty minutes down and back again in the other. But if the water was flat, or at least calm, and the tide was high, or at least not too low, we’d toe our way out of our shoes, grab our stashed paddle boards, and venture off to the north, following the gleam of the setting sun as it lay a path across the water. A walk or a paddle. A waddle.  

It was August: dry, still, warm. We decided to paddle, and for some reason — it must have been the flatness of the water, or the slack tide — we decided to stay out longer than usual. We found ourselves on our backs on our boards in the middle of the passage. Empty, flawlessly blue skies swam above us, a hundred feet of sea — generally restless and churning — opened gently below. We just floated there, each with a heel on the other’s board to keep us rafted together. It wasn’t a particularly stunning sunset but a quiet affair; the bare bulb of the sun merely slipped behind the line of the Olympics. The sky it left behind darkened in that velvety way. 

Watching a clear sky for stars at dusk is a magical thing. The first is slow to emerge, the tiniest irregularity in what has all day been a seemingly empty, unblemished sky. I lay there, scanning for anything but the nothingness the daylight suggested, thinking of my Uncle Jeff, who stood in the front yard of my grandparents’ suburban house and scanned the sky for the night’s first three stars, at which point the day was over and he broke his religious fasting. Though I didn’t share its religious underpinnings, I’ve carried this practice with me as a place to lay the threshold marking the day’s end and the night’s beginning since. 

Finally, my eye picked up on the slightest glint and couldn’t set it down again. As I watched it, it slowly developed into the star I knew was there all along. Before too long, I counted three. Soon stars emerged faster than I could note, and in too numerous a quantity to take in. As the sky from which they emerged darkened and the water and air around me held its stillness, the stars danced in the contrast. As the birds grew silent, and the sounds of boat and car and plane engines tapered off, I could nearly hear them, in the words of the poet David Whyte:

like a great crowd / of creation singing

We felt pulled on invisible heart strings deeper into the moment. The darker it grew, the more darkness we craved. As the tide ebbed and pulled us north, we used our hands to shield our faces from the blue glow of televisions issuing from the large picture windows of nearly every house along the shore. I understood something in that moment. Something I can’t articulate but is accompanied by a heavy sadness for anyone who can’t feel this pull for all the distractions the world has on offer. 

I stood slowly on my board, ready to paddle against the gentle tide back into the shadow of the pier. Whether we audibly gasped in unison or made no sounds at all, we were both arrested at what met our eyes next. There, on the surface of the placid sea, was the reflection of all the dancing stars overhead, some of which leapt and rolled in the ripples our boards made as we steadied ourselves upright. I stood there between the seas of stars, wordlessly praying for a porosity that would allow them to wash through me as they beamed down and reflected upward again. I thought of Mary, often depicted with a crown of stars, or against a background of stars, or floating on them, or wearing star-embroidered robes. The same woman, at times and in places revered as Queen of Heaven, and in others as Star of the Sea. Maybe she prayed for the same porosity.

In low tones we voiced our delight at the extraordinary nature of the world around us on such an ordinary night and our disbelief that we were the only two out to enjoy it. Just then, a dark round head surfaced ten feet to my left. She blew salt water from her nostrils, eyed me for a second, then dove below the surface again where she was astonishingly visible due to the next of the night’s delights – the water was teeming with phosphorescence. The seal flew through the sea of reflected stars. She whirled and dipped and looked for all the world like a mythical constellation come to life, faintly blue and shimmering. 

Our eyes adjusted, straining to see beyond the mirrored surface into the depths of the sea, until we couldn’t tell star from phosphorescence. “Can you believe this?” I whispered. And just then, just as I put the upward inflection on this, a shooting star arced across the south eastern sky streaming a thick tail behind it. 

Believe it.

We laughed together. A coyote yipped back a reply. We howled. An owl hooted. I almost died of ecstacy. 

We paddled slowly, reverently watching whorls and eddies in glowing blue streaming from our flat blades. We reached the darkness of the pier. We spotted a spider crab, immaculately outlined in glowing blue and scuttling up and down a submerged piling. The Cancer constellation incarnate, his pinchers waved expectantly in the current. He descended a barnacle covered beam, beckoning us to follow. 

We began, in hushed tones, narrating our evening as if it were a children’s book. Our protagonists peered over the edge of their paddleboards at the little spider crab in blue. The crab played the role of aquatic Pied Piper, and lured them off their boards into the dark water where they sank to the seabed and found themselves ushered in, by glowing pinchers, to an Octopus’s Garden. This garden was a maritime Eden, where iridescent seaweed shimmered in the blue light of phosphorescence coating everything that moved. And what moved was a Peaceable Kingdom of sea creatures: sea slugs, sea stars, anemones, turtles, fish, seals and sea lions, and a kindly giant Pacific Octopus queen, who provided for her guests to sample a flight of eight seaweeds that she harvested herself, one in each sucker-covered tentacle. 

They stayed and stayed until they heard, muffled and from a long distance, someone call them back to the surface. They secured an invitation to revisit this enchanted realm at any time they wished, it was always there for them. Then the sea creatures scattered and the garden dissipated into watercolor pigment swirls suspended in liquid and they floated back to surface where they found themselves, dry and on their boards, peering into the sea wondering if what they just experienced was real. 

As we spoke the last lines of our story, a sudden breeze broke the spell, scrubbing the sea of its reflective glass and its translucence. We paddled to shore, a bit dazed, wondering if we’d just experienced the most magical night of our lives. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What did it feel like, being back in Jawbone?” they asked.

“Good!” Alex and I both enthused. “Wonderful, really, and…”

And all the trees were dead. I’d seen footage and images and I went well prepared for what we encountered when we finally faced the reality of the new Opal Creek Wilderness in person, and still.

We didn’t know what to say next. We knew our friends were wary of the idea of visiting again, but ever since we’d said goodbye to Auggie and driven out of the Opal Creek Wilderness that afternoon I’d been obsessed with the idea of revisiting with the dearest of my Opal Creek community.

I tried to choose my words carefully, but they stumbled out of my mouth nonetheless and fell in a blunt force heap, “I mean, everything is dead.”

Before we’d gone back into the Opal Creek Wilderness for the first time since the 2020 Beachie Creek Fire roared through, I’d imagined there must be pockets of living trees in places. Wildfires tend to burn in mosaic patterns, surely there were green stands here and there. I expected to be able to put some kind of pacifying number to it. Perhaps I would find twenty percent of the trees had survived.

“Stand replacing” was a term I’d read in reference to the Beachie Creek Fire within the Opal Creek drainage, in particular. “Worst case scenario.” It took facing it to fully appreciate these words. Out of 100 trees, 100 were dead. We could spot a stand of green trees in several pockets, but they were small, many of them experiencing delayed mortality due to the extreme change in their environment. Out of 1,000 trees, 1,000 were dead.

Auggie oriented us to the fire damage over the two days and nights we spent in Jawbone Flats with him. In places, as when we hiked up Flume Creek in the Opal Creek drainage, the fire was severe enough that many trees were charred to nubbins. The rest had blown down in the firestorm’s hurricane-force winds creating a hellscape of pickup sticks that stretched up the canyon as far as the eye could see.

And the eye could see. Much farther than ever before. Opal Creek is a temperate rainforest; the visibility in the under-canopy before the fire had been limited despite the forest’s maturity. Now the contours of the land were newly visible, like some mean spirited parent had come through one morning and in one swipe snapped the velvety green duvet right off the slumbering form beneath it.

In other places, as when we came in on the road that runs between the gate and Jawbone Flats, the 1920s era mining town where the organization’s education center was before it burned down, the fire burned less severely and moved through more quickly. The effects were still deadly, but differently so.

“The fire ecologists called this dragons’ breath,” Auggie told us as we jostled along in the UTV at dusk on our way into camp the first night. “If you look carefully, you’ll see that the trees are completely intact, they still have their branches, even their twigs. This ball of flame came hurtling through here and killed everything it touched. But just barely.”

Auggie warned us of the land’s new pitfalls each time we ventured off the trail. “Some of the trees burned all the way to the root tips and left gaping holes in the ground,” he said, pulling aside a thatch of trailing blackberry to expose a burn scar deep enough to leave anyone who stumbled into it below ground level. They were impossible to see, covered as they were with the profusion of life bounding back in the burn scar. We moved tentatively.

I remembered reading on the Beachie Creek Fire InciWeb page – a multi-agency repository of wildfire data – that at one point the fire was growing by 90 acres per second. I remembered reading about its rate of advance and realizing that it was such that even the fleetest of animals with the endurance required wouldn’t have been able to outrun or outfly it. I remembered all the natural history spotlights I’d written for Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center in my six years of employment with the organization. I would include population density information, and then, with simple math, estimate the population within the Opal Creek Wilderness: twenty-six black bear, as many as one hundred and thirty-seven endangered Northern Spotted Owls, two point three cougar. The acreage comprising the Wilderness was only a third of the acreage that burned in the Beachie Creek Fire and a mere 8% of the acreage burned in the Santiam Fire (the name of the merged Beachie Creek and adjacent Lionshead Fires). I remember my heart breaking open even more as this reality settled in.

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The third component of place attachment – after considering who is attached and how one is attached – is place. To what is the attachment made? In place attachment research, place is conceptualized in social and physical contexts. Social attachment is called belongingness by social psychologists.

“Part of social place bonding involves attachment to the others with whom individuals interact in their place, and part of it involves attachment to the social group that the place represents. This latter type of attachment, and recognition that the place symbolizes one’s social group, is closely aligned with place identity,” write Gifford and Scannell in Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Framework.

At Opal Creek, the social relationships and group identity were baked into the gig. We – the employees of Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center and residents of Jawbone Flats – called ourselves Jawboners. ‘Boners for short. Gifford and Scannell continue, “One is attached to the place because it facilitates ‘distinctiveness’ from other places, or affirms the specialness of one’s group.” Opal Creek’s distinctiveness from other places, the specialness, was the place itself. The place itself lured us in and created the container for the community that thrived within it. The place itself fueled the passion for the old growth forest education and conservation work we engaged in. “Opal Creek is the only environmental education school in Oregon that teaches old growth forest ecology in an old growth forest. Opal Creek is the largest remaining intact tract of old growth in the state; the entire watershed is protected from ridgeline to ridgeline.” I wrote some variation on those sentences in every grant application we ever submitted. To us, Opal Creek’s distinctiveness was self-evident and we were its champions.

“Community attachment researchers assume that attachment to a place means attachment to those who live there and to the social interactions that the place affords them,” write Gifford and Scannell. “These definitions suggest that social place attachment…[centers] upon the place as an arena for social interactions, or as a symbol for one’s social group. However, attachment obviously can also rest on the physical features of the place.”

Continued next week.

The Forest Service’s Industrial Fire Precaution Levels (IFPLs) are stepped measures that apply to work activities on Forest Service lands. Their purpose is to reduce the risk of wildfire starting from logging operations. During our weekend at Opal Creek, we hovered between IFPL level II and III. Because of our location in a burned National Forest, chainsaw use was restricted after one o’clock for the fire danger it posed.

Auggie made a couple chainsaw cuts ahead of the early afternoon deadline. A pair of dead trees had pierced the Half Bridges, root wads up, since his last visit in. These bridges – Swiss in design and partially embedded in the rocky cliff wall, partially cantilevered from it – were badly burned on that cantilevered edge. The location of the newly fallen trees forced the drive path for the UTV to veer dangerously far out onto charred bridge timbers. When we came in with him the previous evening, he’d made us get out and walk that section.

He and Alex muscled the burnt stumps off the side of the historically sketchy and now epically so Half Bridges. Using a peavey, I sent a pair of blackened logs over the same edge. We listened to them crashing down the steep pitch to the river rushing below. The distance, measured in sound, was far greater than we’d guessed just by looking down toward the valley bottom through the new, brushy growth.

We worked in the hot sun, widening the long-contested, newly shadeless road into Jawbone so Auggie could drive in the seven foot wide excavator needed for camp clean up. When we’d covered the distance from the Half Bridges to Jawbone we switched tasks, walking up the historic flume line to take an outflow reading.

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One behavioral outcome of place attachment – care – has always been the most interesting to me. “People with stronger place attachments tend to perform more pro-environmental behaviors, either as a direct attempt to preserve the place and protect it from damage, or as an indirect result of internalizing the community’s values of environmental protection,” Gifford and Scannell write in their environmental psychology textbook chapter on place attachment.

Jawbone Flats Environmental Education Center, the era of Opal Creek that I knew, hoped to instill a love of old growth forests in the outdoor school kids that came through our program each year. I remember quoting Baba Dioum in my fundraising appeal letter one year – “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” We didn’t know about place attachment science, but we modeled it for hundreds of outdoor school kids annually. We banked on it being a strong enough force to accomplish the work of conservation.

Of all of place attachment research’s eddies, this is my favorite. This little gently swirling idea that the ultimate promise of attaching ourselves to place, of teaching ourselves and our children to love – to invest time and emotion in – forests, and individual trees, and rivers, and the amphibians that live in their cold, oxygen rich waters has this way of eliciting caring behaviors.

This is the urgency I feel. This is what stumbling into the Opal Creek Wilderness sixteen years ago started. This is what working in environmental education and making investments of time and attention in Opal Creek over the years worked in me. The understanding that the ultimate expression of place attachment is care. That nothing feels better than putting my hands in the earth – however fire blackened – and working for its renewal.

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The PVC pipe that had delivered Jawbone Flats’ water supply up until camp was evacuated in September 2020 looked like a thick ribbon of toasted marshmallow snaking up the steep creek bed to the intake a mile from camp. We trampled through thick ground thatch of native blackberries so ripe and plentiful that the hot air filled with the smell of freshly made jam.

As weather patterns in the Western Cascades have changed in recent years, less and less rain has fallen on Opal Creek in the summer months, and for longer stretches of time. In my six summer seasons with Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, we transitioned from dependably squeaking by on the water Flume Creek could provide us toward the end of summer to dependly running out. Toward the end of my tenure, August and September were marked by no power to camp except what a loud propane generator provided for a few hours in the morning and evening. Drinking and cooking water was provided in plastic dispensers. Flume Creek was offline until the autumn rains returned.

Scratched, sooty, and filled with blackberries, we tested the outflow of a new intake location with an iPhone timer and a twenty gallon garbage can Auggie had hauled up with us. The pool just above the intake location I’d always known was deeper and promised a more consistent water volume and pressure. Auggie had replaced the damaged intake head to test his new location. It dumped its volume into the shallower creekbed below where he stood with the twenty gallon garbage can to catch its contents. He shouted start and stop times I recorded with his phone’s timer. Alex videoed our informal test, which we repeated half a dozen times. On average, the twenty gallon bucket filled in three seconds; the outflow was strong.

It was humbling to watch Auggie care for the burned landscape. He picked up scraps of twisted metal and puddles of melted PVC and organized them into trash heaps to be hauled out who knows when. He pulled invasive weeds that are beginning to pop up inside the gate. He cleared the intake of the flume line and tested its flow. All without knowing if or when Jawbone Flats will house program participants again, if or when the flume line will be rebuilt.

What binds people with place? Love, ultimately. Love that builds with time and holds the promise of expressing itself as care.

“What’s it like? Being back here after…how long has it been since you’ve been in?” Auggie Gleason, Jawbone Flats Caretaker asked me as we sat on the back porch of Cabin 4 on our first morning in camp.

We’d not been in Jawbone Flats, or near the Opal Creek Wilderness, since we came together with our dearest friends to watch the total solar eclipse of 2017. It’d been an unimaginable seven years.

I looked down at my hands as I considered Auggie’s question. What was it like to be back here?

In one hand, I held a cup of coffee. It felt good, so good, to be back in the Opal Creek watershed. We’d caught glimpses of the creek through the gathering dusk as we rode the last three miles into Jawbone with Auggie on the UTV the night before. It was every bit as translucent. Cabin 4 smelled exactly the same when we walked in the door. The creek’s music from the cabin sounded so sweet, so familiar.

In the years between our eclipse visit and the fire, Alex and I were both in new, demanding jobs. We’d just been married. We were building our home. Six hours’ driving distance yawned between Bainbridge Island and Jawbone Flats, an impossibility that felt temporal. We told ourselves, often and out loud, that Opal Creek would be there for us when we were done.

The Opal Creek Wilderness has been closed to the public since the 2020 Beachie Creek Fire leveled the forest and the 1920s era mining camp turned environmental education center at Jawbone Flats. The organization’s special use permit with the Forest Service allows them to access their private fifteen-acre inholding, and with this access they are cleaning up, researching, and preparing to rebuild. We’d come to help with this effort in exchange for access.

We’d met Auggie only once before, at a fundraising event for the organization we’d attended in the fall. Our encounter was brief, but the Jawbone magic was there instantly – a palpable experience of familiarity, a bones-deep understanding between stranger-kin.

“You’ve got to come in,” he invited. It was the invitation we were after and all the encouragement we needed to mount a months-long effort to accept.

And finally we were there, sitting on the back porch of Cabin 4. I came assuming I’d be hit by intermittent waves of grief and other overwhelming emotions. I imagined my memories enacted by specters dancing up and down main street. In retrospect, my expectations were there in my imagination. The reality was flat by comparison. It felt familiar, and familiar felt good. Or almost good. But it was wildly unfamiliar at the same time. More than anything, I felt disoriented.

Ironically, Cabin 4, the one residential cabin that survived the fire, is the one that has been threatened by the shifting channel of the North Fork of the Santiam River that runs behind it. Eventually, if Cabin 4 isn’t dismantled and removed from the site, it will slough off into the river.

In the hand opposite my coffee cup I held a joint. “It feels kinda like this,” I said finally in response to Auggie’s question. “Like having your uppers with your downers.”

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Process, the second component of researchers Robert Gifford and Leila Scannell’s three part definition of place attachment, is interested in how people become attached to place. What are the mechanisms of attachment? As is practice in other social-psychological conceptual frameworks, this question is answered in three parts: affect, cognition, and behavior.

“Humanistic geographers describe place belongingness in emotional [affective] terms,” write Gifford and Scannell in their 2009 paper “Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework.” By way of example they reference the emergence of the word “topophilia,” or love of place.

Affect’s relationship to place attachment is often observed in events of displacement. “Grief is not limited to the death of a loved one, but can emerge following the loss of an important place,” they write, “displacement results in feelings of sadness and longing.” They continue, “The desire to maintain closeness to a place is an attempt to experience the positive emotions that a place may evoke.”

If, as one researcher has concluded, “attachment is primarily based in affect,” then the role of cognition is to create the foundation for those positive emotions by way of experience.

“Place attachment as cognition involves the construction of, and bonding to, place meaning, as well as the cognitions [memories, beliefs, meanings, and knowledge] that facilitate closeness to a place,” Gifford and Scannell explain. “Fullilove (1996) views familiarity as the cognitive component of place attachment; to be attached is to know and organize the details of the environment.”

I wondered in Jawbone upon my post-fire return what it was, then, to be attached affectively and cognitively – to feel strong emotions and hold memories and meanings and knowledge – but simultaneously be suddenly and entirely unfamiliar with a place. Perhaps my brain was working so furiously to organize the details of the environment around me in its new iteration that I simply had no space for emotion.

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Proximity maintaining behavior is the most often cited behavioral outcome of place attachment. When you love a place, you stay there, or nearby, or you visit often, or as often as possible. The research indicates that periodic travel and even prolonged absence from places of attachment can have a positive effect on the person-place bond. It’s not that a place-attached person never leaves (which is often more an indicator of socio-economic status than place attachment), it’s that one always has the impulse to return again. An inborn homing beacon of sorts. A sense of when it’s been too long.

I’d been away too long. It had been too long already before the Beachie Creek Fire raged through Opal Creek. My own intrinsic homing signals called incessantly in the time we waited for access. But just being there wasn’t enough.

Auggie seemed to know that. He’s been bringing people into the new Opal Creek for three years now, watching their reactions.

“I like to have a project to do when we’re in there,” he told me over the phone in April when we first began planning our visit. “It helps people to process what they’re experiencing.”

We insisted on it, and Alex took no small pleasure in packing both chainsaws and pairs of chaps in preparation for volunteer glory in the burned old growth. He was thwarted by heat.

Continued next week.

“Welcome home!” Auggie Gleason called to us from the other side of a locked gate. He circled the scene with a gestural arm before adding, “Sorry the place is such a mess.”

Alex and I had arrived at the steel Forest Service gate just moments before Auggie, Facilities Director and Jawbone Flats Caretaker for Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, pulled up on a UTV from the opposite direction. I strained for recognition, but little of what I saw registered as familiar, no matter how I squinted at the scene that rose up around him.

“The last caretaker that came to visit me met me here and said, ‘Wow, you’ve really let the place go!’” Auggie laughed. We made our greetings then turned and faced up the Opal Creek drainage. Blackened trees stared us down. Most stood upright, some had snapped, sagged or slouched.

Swaths of blowdown intermittently changed the texture of the scene from our distance. The contours of the land, previously dressed in layers of soil and duff, an under canopy of flowers and shrubs, and an ancient forest overcoat, were visible. The whole place was rockier than I’d ever reckoned, flayed to the bone by the 2020 Beachie Creek fire that had kept us out of the Opal Creek Wilderness since.

But here we were, finally. I considered Auggie’s greeting as he unlocked the gate and we maneuvered through. Welcome home.

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Place attachment grabbed my attention before the Beachie Creek fire raged through the Oregon Cascades four years ago. In my role as a writer in an architecture firm, I often referenced the phenomena “sense of place,” and the two concepts are closely related. In an afternoon’s work that has stuck with me since, I discovered place attachment research while trying to understand and articulate what a repeated experience of a place might provide a client’s program participants living with disabilities and other barriers to outdoor recreation. A lot, I learned.

Place attachment is generally understood to mean the connection experienced between people and the places where their lives play out. Research on place attachment has proliferated in my lifetime, and environmental psychology researchers Robert Gifford and Leila Scannell have made an effort to organize findings into a framework that unites separate but related concepts within the field. Their 2009 paper published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, “Defining Place Attachment, A Tripartite Framework,” and the subsequent environmental psychology textbook chapter they co-authored, “Psychology of Place Attachment,” formed the foundation of my introduction to this science.

Gifford and Scannell’s three part framework asks, “Who is attached? How, or by what means?” and, “To what?” It then organizes place attachment research by the corresponding categories of People, Process, and Place. Much of place attachment research focuses on one or two of these three categories, and within Gifford and Scannell’s framework, their interplay and dependence becomes apparent.

Applying this same framework to my experience of Opal Creek has been a mental-emotional exercise in witnessing my own grief. I’ve used Gifford and Scannell’s work to understand what I am (and to a certain extent my community is) feeling and experiencing since the Beachie Creek Fire and why. Understanding that has helped me get curious about the larger story, the scene within which my own experience and this moment in time is nestled.

“Place attachment occurs at both the individual and group levels,” write Gifford and Scannell in Defining Place Attachment. They start at the smallest end of the scale: “At the individual level, it involves the personal connections one has to a place. For example, place attachment is stronger for settings that evoke personal memories, and this type of place attachment is thought to contribute to a stable sense of self. Similarly, places become meaningful from personally important experiences, such as realizations, milestones (e.g., where I first met my significant other), and experiences of personal growth.”

I considered my own biography against this list of factors. I found Opal Creek and Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, the environmental education nonprofit that operated from a private inholding at the heart of the Wilderness area, as a recent college graduate. I was newly arrived in the Pacific Northwest and searching for a community – both people and a place – that resonated more than what I’d left behind in the Midwest.

The realizations and milestones in Opal Creek came at the lightning pace of life in one’s twenties, a personal growth spurt that lasted the entirety of my six year tenure with the organization. Despite my Portland address, Opal Creek was the setting of my life for those years. My community was there, all my closest friends. I spent as many work hours as I could justify in the wilderness and a lot of my free time beyond that. I learned the physical place better than anywhere I’d ever lived. I loved its pockets and permutations. My purpose was woven into and throughout my belonging there. I discovered something unnamable but essential about myself in Opal Creek, and then doubled down on nurturing it in place as much as I could.

And, I was among friends.

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At the group level, attachment is comprised of the symbolic meanings of a place that are shared among members (Low, 1992). Group-framed place attachment has been examined in different cultures, genders, and religions. For example, attachment has been described as a community process in which groups become attached to areas wherein they may practice, and thus preserve, their cultures (e.g., Fried, 1963; Gans, 1962; Michelson, 1976). Culture links members to place through shared historical experiences, values, and symbols.

In addition, place attachment may be religiously based. Through religion, the meanings of certain places become elevated to the status of sacred (Mazumdar & Mazumdar, 2004). Revered places such as Mecca or Jerusalem or, on a smaller scale, churches, temples, shrines, burial sites, or divine places in nature, are central to many religions, and their sacred meanings are shared among worshippers. Not only do such places seem to bring worshippers closer to their gods, but reverence for, and protection of, these places essentially reflects one’s cultural fealty.

My experience of attaching to Opal Creek was neither unique nor isolated. I was part of a lineage of lovers of this place that was neither cultural, religious nor merely professional, but seemed to subsume all these categories. The work of preservation, historical experiences, values, symbols, the sense of the sacred, reverence for and sense of duty to protect – these were among the shared experiences that foundationed the Opal Creek community and contributed to our collectively held place attachment.

When Alex and I left Jawbone last Sunday afternoon, we drove straight to Hood River to connect with our Opal Creek community. Some of them had been into Opal Creek since the fire as part of the fledgeling restoration efforts, others hadn’t.

I can’t know exactly what it feels like for my closest friends also experiencing the loss of the Opal Creek we knew before the Beachie Creek Fire. I can say, though, that the friendships formed in that place have endured. That our connections to each other have actually strengthened in the past years. That, for me at least, being together is a balm against the ache of our collective exile from the place we love. That someday we’ll be back in that place together, laughing.

Continued next week.

On a hot, hot day last weekend, we spent an afternoon floating in Totten Inlet. We were out for hours, baking in the sun. The top six inches of water, in the slack low tide of a 90 degree midday, was a comfortable 70 degrees. Below that it was cold enough to leave hot skin tingling.

As we floated we watched harbor seals. A colony of them resides on large floating logs delineating the Steamboat Island Marina, where my husband’s parents moor their boat. As we left the marina we carefully arced around them, though it’s impossible to maintain any kind of meaningful distance in the tight curve of the exit created by Steamboat Island. They were active that day, their round heads popping up intermittently in the glint of sun on the water. We moved slowly and stopped frequently.

At the end of our lazy float through the inlet, when we turned the boat against the incoming tide and headed to the marina at its mouth, we were slowed by a commotion near the eastern shore. Gulls and cormorants circled frantically. The water boiled. I began trying to count the shining dark domes of harbor seal heads, but I quickly lost track in the commotion.

We made a wide pass and then turned the boat off to watch through binoculars. Smelt jumped across the surface of the water. The harbor seals swam in formation, presumably eating their fill. The birds careened and cried out their greed. The whole scene was wildly delightful.

And then it began moving our way. The school of bait fish at the heart of this feeding frenzy was swimming for their lives against the incoming tide, and the rest of the food chain was following. Suddenly, seals were breaching twenty feet off our starboard, their accompanying avian entourage directly overhead.

Thousands of tiny, silver fish, dozens of birds, easily fifty harbor seals. And two humans, laughing at their dumb luck under a hot, July sun.

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And now I’m in Opal Creek. Finally. And it feels so good.

“Harbor seals are extremely skittish,” reported Casey Mclean, marine biologist, veterinary nurse and executive director at SR3. Sometimes all it takes for a mother harbor seal to abandon her pup for good is a concerned person showing up anywhere in the vicinity. That’s why Mclean is adamant, “The best thing we can do for a marine animal in distress is keep our distance and call in the experts.”

I worked my way through the tent, taking in each of the five harbor seal pups in residence. The coloration, age, and care requirements varied from pup to pup, but each, at five o’clock in the evening as we toured their nursery, was hungry and crying out for food.

This cry, which a harbor seal mother can hear and recognize as her pup’s from as far as a kilometer away, is often misconstrued as a distress cry, leading a lot of well-meaning people to “rescue” harbor seal pups who simply need to feed.

The pups have to be separated from each other at this stage in their recovery at the facility operated by Sealife Rescue, Rehabilitation and Research (SR3) in DesMoines, Washington marina. Some carry contagions and all are vulnerable as pups away from their mothers and natural environments. So they are kept in separate blue crates – all furnished with boppies, some with heat lamps – until they are at weaning age and ready for the communal pool where they’ll learn to fish and compete for food.

A couple of the pup crates had been made into kiddie pools, filled with salt water and “enrichment toys” – long strips of green felt that mimic kelp. A dark gray pup registered her hunger from one of them. She whirled like a dervish through the green ribbons, slapped the water with her flippers, and bellowed on her little kazoo of a voice box.

We had been instructed to keep our voices to a minimum and not get overly interactive with the pups – the goal of their rehabilitation is to rewild them, after all – and I attempted to stifle my obvious delight behind my hand as I watched her twirl and splash.

I took a second round through the nursery tent, trying to hear nuances in the pups’ voices, before filing out with the rest of the group.

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Back inside, Mclean and SR3’s veterinarian Dr. Michelle Rivard presented on the final R in the organization’s name: research. Both, and other researchers and marine biologists within the organization, are able to utilize their research focuses away from home to benefit local marine environments and animals.

Dr. Rivard travels annually to Nova Scotia where she is part of a research consortium studying gray seals. She provides veterinary care and ensures proper sedation of the animals being studied, and in return she is able to “transfer a knowledge base to the Pacific Northwest that we can apply to our local seals and sea lions,” an SR3 blog post celebrates.

Mclean’s research passion is sea turtles and her expertise and research experience also transfers to local waters.

“Sea turtles should never be in Puget Sound,” Mclean noted, but it does happen, and increasingly. “In the previous twenty-five years, the Puget Sound region reported eight sea turtle strandings,” she reported. “We’ve had four in the years since SR3 was founded in 2021.”

The turtles will inadvertently ride warm currents far from their home waters. Climate change is causing those warm currents to reach farther and farther north. The problem arises when the turtles exit the warm water currents and find themselves in temperatures in which they cannot survive.

“They get cold stunned,” Mclean told us. Not only is this a potentially fatal condition if they don’t quickly find warmer water, but in their cold water torpor they’re also more likely to be struck by a boat. “If you ever see a sea turtle in Puget Sound, please call the marine animal stranding network,” she urged.

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Side by side images of two gray whales were projected onto a screen at the front of the room where Mclean and Dr. Rivard presented. “We are able to use drone photography now to track our Sounders,” Mclean shared. “We used to have to take these images from airplanes – it was the Indiana Jones moment for our marine biologists who literally had to snap pictures hanging out of the doors.” The new method is both safer for the researchers and less invasive for the whales.

“We’re able to take these images from 100-150 feet above the water – they don’t even know we’re there,” she continued.

A brief video clip showed a pair of SR3 researchers, Dr. Holly Fearnbach and Dr. John Durban, deploying a drone from a boat. Dr. Fearnbach hunched beneath a blanket where she captured footage broadcast by the drone, directing its movement verbally, while Dr. Durban controlled the drone’s movement with a remote.

Mclean referred again to the gray whale images. “We’re able to tell a lot about the health of individuals by keeping annual reference images like this. We can see the changes in overall body condition from year to year. We can also see, as in this second image, when a whale is pregnant. So we expect to see her with a calf next,” Mclean continued. “If she’s spotted again without one, we know to count that as a birth and a loss in the Sounder population.”

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By the end of their presentation, SR3’s braided focus of rescue, rehabilitation and research presented its strength. Their vigilance as caretakers and researchers, watching diseases and mortality events ebb and flow with temperature and quality fluctuations, positions them as unsung guardians of Pacific Northwest marine environments. Their proximity and familiarity with local marine animal populations and health concerns prepares them to be impactful when the stakes are higher. Establishing a broad knowledge base on effective treatment in relatively healthy populations of harbor seals, for instance, implies better outcomes if an endangered Guadalupe fur seal were to ever need such care.

SR3’s expertise helps to center the wellness of Northwest marine environments in conservation policy, extending their impacts far beyond the 50 or so harbor seals and the dozen other marine animals they’ll directly care for this year. And, the point is made on SR3’s website, “Marine mammals of the Salish Sea are known to be susceptible to pollution- and environmentally-induced medical conditions; thus, marine mammals can be important sentinels and early warning indicators of public health and environmental change.”

Mclean made the point in her presentation, too: what’s good for the local marine environment is good for the region – both in terms of the overall health of all of its living beings, and, in a region built in part on a robust fishery, in terms of its economics.

In other words, my health and the harbor seal pups’ are inextricably linked. Our fates are intertwined, held in common by the salt water environment that fills the bottom of this mountainous bowl we call home.

The sound of a five piece kazoo ensemble met our ears. We stepped carefully in a black plastic bus tub filled with an inch of disinfectant and ducked into the tent. We craned our necks to get our first glimpse of the musicians – a quintet of harbor seal pups being rehabilitated by Sealife Response, Rehab + Research (SR3) – singing for their supper.

I peered over the edge of a large, blue plastic bin with a tag that read “Griffin PV5”. Inside a white harbor seal pup with brownish-gray spots and earnest eyes peered back at me. He blinked sleepily and bleated on his little toy of a voice box. He was curled up on a baby blue boppy with a playful dog print. A light blue hat tag with the number 5 was glued to the top of his head.

Casey Mclean had told us Griffin’s story in the exam room portion of our tour. An x-ray of Griffin’s chest showed an enlarged esophagus. His condition didn’t allow him to keep food down, and would starve him to death without treatment. “Any guesses how we might treat this?” Mclean asked around but we shook our heads, no one had any idea.

“Viagra!” she exclaimed. “If we give him viagra right before his feedings, the sphincter at the bottom of his esophagus closes and keeps the food in his stomach long enough for him to digest it.”

We laughed, shaking our heads in disbelief. “How many times will this drug be reinvented?” she wondered aloud, eliciting another laugh. “We’re cautiously optimistic, but so far it’s working! We heard about this treatment from a marine mammal center in British Columbia – it had worked for them with two different patients. So we’re giving it a try.”

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Since witnessing the release of Dragon last month, SR3’s first harbor seal pup patient of 2024, I’ve stayed in touch with the organization, learning more about their work. Casey Mclean – marine biologist, veterinary nurse and executive director at SR3 – invited me to join a behind the scenes tour of the organization’s facility in the DesMoines Marina, just south of SeaTac.

Our tour began at the ambulance parked outside the windscreen wrapped hurricane fencing that delineated SR3’s facility from the rest of the marina parking lot that housed it. “When we need to transport a sick or injured animal to our facility, this is how we do it,” Mclean shared, thumping the open back door of the rig.

The ambulance is climate controlled, allows for treatment and monitoring enroute, and can be hosed out at the end of a dirty ride. But, Mclean noted, “It’s a bumpy ride.” The organization would love to have a patient transport vehicle with all of this functionality that moves more smoothly. “These animals are either abandoned newborns or injured or sick. They’re being handled by humans. They’re under enough stress,” she added.

“And no,” Mclean seemed to read the delusion I was entertaining in that very moment, “we don’t get to run the lights for these guys. They work, but we’d get pulled over real fast.”

We followed her into the fenced compound. It consisted of a double-wide trailer, two outdoor saltwater pools, a necropsy trailer, the salination and filtration systems for the pools, and the tent in which the infant animals are kept and cared for until they’re ready to be outdoors with the adults.

We started on the far end of the double-wide, in the fish kitchen. Mclean explained that the adult patients are fed small fish, mostly herring and some anchovies. “The Tribe generously donated salmon to us a couple years ago, but our patients didn’t know what to do with it – it was too big for them,” Casey laughed.

She held up a large syringe with a long tube attached. “This is our tubing equipment. This is how we feed the pups,” she said. “They’re too distractible to bottle feed, and they eat four to five times a day. We could never get enough in them any other way.”

Harbor seal pups wean in four to six weeks postpartum, and in that time, they more than double their weight. SR3’s harbor seal pup patients tend to come in underweight or as newborns. “In these first weeks when they should still be nursing, we have to put weight on them as quickly as possible,” Mclean emphasized. Their formula is 40% fat. “And we add more fat to that,” she said.

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We stepped into a bin of disinfectant as we left the fish kitchen and followed Mclean past an office through a kitchen and dining area (with a note on the fridge declaring, “NO FISH! Human food only!”), and, after stepping in another bin of disinfectant, into the exam and treatment room. A life size plush harbor seal was staged on the exam and operating table.

Mclean turned our attention to their handheld x-ray device and then to a domed and chambered x-ray of a sea turtle projected on a screen. She pointed out their anesthesia machine. A canine anesthesia cone was affixed to the plush seal. She explained how marine mammals behave differently under anesthesia than land mammals because of their dive reflex. “We have to be really careful,” she commented. “Sometimes they dive and we can’t get them back.”

Marine veterinary doctors attend veterinary school and then complete an additional several-years-long training after that – intern and externships, post-doctoral studies, and field work – to learn such nuances of marine animal medicine and research. Mclean noted that, as the only facility of their kind in the Pacific Northwest, SR3 works closely with governmental agencies and collaboratively with other organizations doing similar work in different locations. “We share data, we share best practices,” she told us. “It’s really exciting to be in our position because the data that we collect here from our patients and the research that we’re doing directly impacts conservation policy. It’s making a difference.”

We left the exam room through an exterior door that deposited us in front of the twelve and eight foot pools where adult patients are kept. An adult harbor seal eyed us from the enclosure’s corner. “Just keep moving past,” Mclean urged us, “These guys are curious creatures but at this point in their rehabilitation, we’re trying to make sure they’re not too familiar with humans.”

Save the corner from which their fish was flung into their pool, opaque, perforated plastic sheeting around its perimeter shielded the harbor seals in the smaller of the two pools from our view. We walked by quickly and tried not to make eye contact without entirely missing the inquisitive pinniped, head cocked, eyes bright.

We passed the necropsy trailer, and in a somber moment considered how many animals came to this facility and were not released after a few months. The organization has great success with its patients, and still. On a white board in the main room of the double-wide I’d noticed a column for patient outcomes. Most of the twenty or so 2024 patients on the board were still at the facility; a good number had been released; three had died, one upon arrival.

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And finally, we were at the door of the pup tent. The moment I had been waiting for. Their kazooing voices – cries for food, Mclean explained, audible to their mothers from distances up to a kilometer – sounded hilariously unreal.

I considered Griffin first, eyes filling with tears immediately upon adjusting, knowing that if the little blue pill doesn’t deliver for this little guy, he’ll end up in the necropsy trailer rather than back on the hunt in the Salish Sea. He bleated up at me and I held his gaze for a long moment, wishing him well, thanking Mclean, her colleagues, and her donors for loving the depths of this place deeply. For caring for Griffin and the four other pups who harmonized with him despite their blue crate quarantine.

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Continued next week.

We woke in the early morning, perched in our camper on the edge of Forest Road 2870. We looked east toward Dirty Face Ridge, our first objective of the day. The window over the bed was open wide, admitting the cold air, framing the brilliant blue of the sky and the green on green on green of the Olympic Mountain ridges that stretched out below it.

I climbed down from bed and changed into layers of wool. I made coffee. We piled into the cab with our steaming mugs and drove the rest of the way up the pitted road to our trailhead near its terminus. Despite the blue skies, rain was forecasted for midday, and we wanted to be off the trail by the time it fell.

We’d hiked up and down Dirty Face Ridge toward the end of fall. The views from the top were spectacular, I remembered, but the trail was steep enough – a 30-40% grade that gained 1,250’ in the first mile – that the descent was worth avoiding if one had the time.

The next day I pieced together a route that went up Dirty Face Ridge but then looped through the north-eastern corner of the range, cresting Mount Townsend and tapping Silver Lake, before returning to the gravel forest road not far from the Dirty Face trailhead. I had to wait three seasons to try it out.

We set out at a pace to match the brisk thirty-six degrees. The dog, ever the show-off on her four, spry legs, led the way. We ascended through the woods, the under canopy filled with blooming rhododendron. The grade warmed us perfectly, and we had it to ourselves.

We reached the first open, level shelf and found wild onion blooming on the exposed, upslope side of the trail, their leaves curled on the ground at their feet. After a final stretch of steep grade through trees, we ascended the ridgeline. When we reached its openness, we found a thin sheet of snow blanketing tufts of just-as-white phlox.

Thick pillowy clouds had formed over the Welch Peaks to the south and the Copper and Silver Creek drainages that fell to the north below us. Brilliant patches of blue shone between them, and the sun cast their shadows on the emerald valley bottom.

Then the trail descended below the treeline briefly, and when it emerged again, the view was entirely transformed. We were in a cloud. The one that had been scuttering north from the top of the peaks to our south. The ridgelines had disappeared, as had the shadows of the clouds on the valley bottom. The colorful world we’d been in just moments before – emerald green, cold sky blue, rhododendron pink – was gone.

This one was entirely grayscale. Hoarfrost cloaked the foliage, masking its identity under glinting geometry. The furrow of the trail remained free of snow, and ribboned darkly up the white mountainside under a sky whose tone fell somewhere part way between the two.

We sensed the greatness of the shrouded view. We agreed to return at the first opportunity. This was a new, one and a half mile stretch of trail. Our curiosity burned.

As we crested the western shoulder of Mt. Townsend, an icy breeze blowing up off Puget Sound met our faces and fingers. We didn’t linger at the top, moving quickly for the windbreak of the treeline below us.

When the trail forked we began climbing, shouldering the ridge of Mt. Townsend again for its western slope. We dropped back into a colorful world, down to the edge of Silver Creek. We followed its tumbling song uphill until the mossy tunnel of a trail opened into the Silver Lake basin.

We sat on a domed rock that jutted into the water to eat some breakfast. I watched the trout swimming their tangents. A man cast for them on the far shore of the lake. I quietly wished the trout luck and the man none. With the cold of stillness setting in, we took off again to follow Silver Creek downstream for three miles until the trail spit us out at the end of the road, a mile from where we’d started our morning’s adventure.

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In place attachment science, a person - place - process framework is used to describe the dimensions of the phenomenon. “Thus, given any place attachment, the framework leads us to consider who is attached, what they are attached to, and how (psychologically) they are expressing their attachment,” write Professors Gifford and Scannell in The Psychology of Place Attachment.

The how has captured me of late, the “psychological process dimension.” We both express and experience our place attachments affectively (with emotion), cognitively (with thought), and behaviorally (with action). We love our places; we memorize them; we visit and care for them. These psychological process components feed each other until what we know of the place matures into something more akin to instinct.

Gifford and Scannell write, “As one becomes attached to a place, they develop a mental representation of that place, containing a mental map and route knowledge of the place’s arrangement.” Mount Townsend – easily the most popular hike of the entire range outside the national park – was the very first hike I went on in the Olympic Mountains, ten years ago in November. We’ve hiked dozens of trails and hundreds of miles since, returning to the same switchbacks, to the same peaks and saddles and passes, year after year, tracing with our feet lines simultaneously being etched in our mental maps.

It’s not that I don’t crave novelty, but that I find it constantly, without having to leave home. To know a place with the intimacy of feet on earth for miles and miles, time and time again, year after year, and yet find these moments of astonishment – in its endless iterations of weather, of flowers, of circumstances – is to me a richer reward than far-flung travel. With investments of time and attention we’ve earned the privilege of witnessing this place intimately. The dimension of relationship makes any novelty all the more surprising.

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Three mornings later, on the eve of Summer Solstice, we were back. We woke in the camper on the edge of Forest Road 2820 at the sound of the first bird. It was 3:58 in the morning, two minutes before our alarm was set to go off. The day was just beginning to suggest itself in our west facing view.

Alex made coffee. We piled into the cab with our steaming mugs and drove the rest of the way up the pitted road to our trailhead at its terminus. The skies were blue, the air was ten degrees warmer than it had been three mornings previous, and the forecast called for a perfect day.

We started out at five o’clock, ascending the Little Quilcene Trail again, but this time from its opposite end – the one that gave us a thirty minute advantage in driving time from home. We climbed quickly, following the dog who seemed to sense the work day that stretched beyond our morning hike, and bound up and down the trail, easily covering three times our mileage.

We reached the trail junction. The stretch of trail for which we’d returned lay beyond. As we continued south, the Welch Peaks, Buckhorn and Iron mountains rose up, snow still clinging to their steep, north facing slopes. Looking north we could see the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the San Juan Islands. The blanket of snow and hoarfrost had melted, exposing perfect mounds of phlox that dotted the wide western shoulder of Mount Townsend.

As the trail crested, Mount Rainier greeted us from across Puget Sound. St. Helens, Adams, Glacier, and Baker were all visible, rising above the glinting waterways and velvet punctuation of the Salish Sea and all her islands. We took the victory lap around the top of the broad mountain, taking in the 360 degree views before the time constraints on our day spurred us to hustle down again the way we’d come, reveling in the convergence of good fortune and deliberate action which allowed us to welcome summer in such a way.

“She was bleeding from her nose and was very thin. She was found in the Shilshole Marina and was monitored for a few days. She was old enough to be on her own so we didn’t want to pick her up if she could fight it off. It turned out she couldn’t, so she was picked up and brought to SR3 and has been with us for a couple months.”

The “she” to which Casey Mclean referred was a sub-adult female harbor seal named Dragon. A group of about twenty spectators had gathered at the Fort Ward boat launch on the south end of Bainbridge Island on a rainy midday in May to watch Dragon’s release into the Salish Sea. But first Mclean, the executive director and veterinary nurse at Sealife Response, Rehabilitation and Research (SR3), shared Dragon’s case study with her amassed well-wishers.

Dragon was starving at twelve pounds and suffering from lung worms when SR3 took her in as a patient.

“She went through some pretty intensive treatments, Mclean recounted. “If you think of heartworm with dogs, how we treat that, this is the same type of treatment. So there’s a lot of concern that this treatment can be fatal.”

Thankfully, in Dragon’s case, it wasn’t.

“She pulled through really well and she started gaining weight,” Mclean beamed. “So she’s nice and round now, as you’ll see. She doesn’t really have much of a neck, just as they should be.”

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As their name suggests, SR3 works with marine animals in a number of capacities. They are responders, working to free entrapped or stranded marine animals in the Puget Sound region; they operate the Pacific Northwest’s only hospital dedicated to marine wildlife, with a 30 - 40 seal, sea lion, sea otter, and harbor porpoise patient capacity; and they research Salish Sea marine mammals as indicator species of the region’s overall health.

Mclean founded SR3, and when I followed up with her to ask her why she did this work, she replied, “Humans' everyday actions, whether that be as individuals or big industry, greatly impact the marine environment. Every animal that comes in to the facility is suffering due to a human cause in one way or another, we are not admitting animals that are just dying of old age. It is our collective responsibility to correct our mistakes that are causing these animals to suffer.”

“Cetacean (dolphins, porpoises, whales) strandings have increased from ~2 animals per year in the 1970s to nearly 40 per year in the last decade,” reads the SR3 website, corroborating the human impact on local marine life Mclean named. One of the organization’s blog posts highlights its involvement in the disentanglement of a transient orca from a crab pot last summer: “Bigg’s killer whale T65A5 ‘Indy’ was observed entangled in legally-set recreational crab pot gear on July 5th in Puget Sound. SR3, along with our partners, stand trained and ready year-round to respond to urgent situations like this,” opens the post.

Indy freed himself, in the end. He swam into shallow water where the crab pot made contact with the seabed, the line slackened, and he was able to slip it. He was observed five days later reunited with his mother and five siblings in waters near the Canadian border.

But one point is repeated in the post: “It is important to note that this gear was legally set and configured.” In other words, we allow this to happen. And someone has to take action when it does.

“I sometimes find it hard to compel people to make changes in their everyday activities that are harming the oceans when I talk about fish or invertebrates, although I care about them,” Mclean continued in our correspondence. “Charismatic megafauna (marine mammals), with their big eyes and iconic status, cause people to pause and consider if they could make that small sacrifice to help them. I want all future generations to get to see healthy whales, seals and sea lions thriving in the Salish Sea.”

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On the Fort Ward boat launch, Mclean gave us a snapshot of Dragon’s life, post-release.

“She’s been alone for a long time at the hospital, which always makes us a little bit sad because they are pretty social out there,” she said, gesturing toward the sea. “So we’re happy to get her back out. Maybe she’ll encounter the seal that you guys have seen out here swimming around.”

Mclean pointed south down the beach, “We chose this location because down here to the left there is a seal haul out. So we’re hoping she might find those other seals and reorient herself to the general area.”

The 4,300 feet of saltwater shoreline protected from development at Fort Ward and other waterfront parks like it are crucial to marine mammals who have otherwise been pushed off their waterfront habitats throughout Puget Sound. But despite habitat pressures, harbor seal populations are strong in this region and Mclean was confident in Dragon’s prognosis, “She’s young, she’ll figure it out.”

Harbor seals live within a thirty mile range for the entirety of their 20-30 year long lives. Dragon, who is still less than a year old, will begin reproducing at three to four years of age and have a single pup at a time.

“We’ve entered pupping season,” Mclean told us, “so I apologize if I look like a zombie or say anything crazy, but I’ve been up all night with our newest baby [harbor seal pup]. It’s an intensive care process with this little one – born on Vashon about two months early and is requiring round the clock care.”

As a couple volunteers hoisted a dog crate out of the bed of a pickup truck and began making their way toward the slope of the boat ramp, Mclean told us about Dragon’s various markings. She wore a red hat tag to help identify her while a patient at the hospital and for a while after release. “That’s just glued onto her fur,” Mclean noted, “So that helps us monitor her for a short period of time if people see it, but it’s not a satellite tracker.”

Dragon would also have an orange tag on her right rear flipper, she told us, with a number unique to her. And, she concluded, “Harbor seals can also be identified by their spot pattern. Just like our thumbprints, it’s unique to each individual.” While identifying seals by their spots is a tedious process – one that can’t be simply eyeballed – “If people take pictures out there, we can often identify who it is,” Mclean informed us. “I think now eight of our patients have been reported post-release.”

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Finally, the volunteers hauling Dragon in her dog crate set her down on the boat ramp. A camera was placed on a tripod at ground level on the waterline.

Mclean told us Dragon weighed in at a healthy fifty-four pounds that morning before leaving the facility in the Des Moines Marina, south of Seattle.

“No breakfast, so she’s hungry,” she continued. “We do that so they are hungry, so that’ll inspire them to go hunt for food. She was not happy about it though…”

She and a number of colleagues and volunteers grabbed red body-boards and stood flanking the dog crate, creating a clear line of travel for Dragon, whose whiskered face we glimpsed for the first time as the door was unlatched.

“I’ll just ask as we open the door that you guys remain quiet. If she starts to head your way back up so she has straight access to the water,” Mclean instructed us.

Out plopped Dragon, glancing around at the gathered crowd. Her round body was tan with dark brown spotting, but her head was still covered with white pup fuzz, atop of which was affixed the hat tag Mclean had mentioned.

The red disc was the size of a sand dollar. It reminded me of the tika, the blessing of red vermillion powder mixed with curd placed on the foreheads of the young by their elders during the Nepali Hindu festival Dashain. A demonstration of care, a public acceptance of responsibility, a blessing on her head.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. My heart wobbled. Never more thankful for the coverage of my sunglasses, I felt warm tears breaching my lower lids and spilling down my cheeks. Dragon continued waddling down the mossy boat ramp, glancing from side to side at the twenty people who maybe, like me, were also crying behind their sunglasses.

She scooted past the last camera at the water’s edge, paused and turned back to the crowd and Mclean, whom I imagined she knew quite well (another wobble!), and then turned and slipped into the sea where she was instantly transformed into the most graceful little neckless puddle of fat and spots I’d ever seen swimming in the clear salt water.

Late spring and the preciousness of this season strikes me this year in a way it maybe never has before. The tenderness, the vulnerability, of everything – the brave green shoots of a thousand different forbs and fescues, half of which get mowed down within hours of emerging by hungry slugs, rabbits, and deer. But still the meadow is full – overfull if I’m being honest, that’s my fault – and there’s plenty for all.

It’s especially hard to begrudge the deer their forage. They have fawns to feed this time of year. We’ve seen three different mothers moving through the property in the past month. One fawn, maybe two weeks old, collapsed in a terrified heap in our drive after the neighbors’ Corgi chased her off their lawn a while back.

Body rigid and eyes wide, I thought she was dead until, after about half an hour of laying there, she began panting in the spring sun. I left her watch to gather supplies to shade her – a pair of folding chairs and a beach towel – until she found the courage to get up and rejoin her mother. In my absence she disappeared.

I didn’t see her, her sibling, or mother for a month. Just as well, I thought, I too have a dog rippling with instincts. We keep her leashed for fawn season, but still. Unlike the Corgi, she would not be deterred in the least if the doe turned on her and charged.

But I worry about the fawns when I haven’t seen them for a few days. I try not to pay too close attention, not to keep a census, but I can’t help myself. Our dog found a dead fawn in the woods last spring. She pulled Alex straight to where it lay curled in a lifeless ball in the dark. In the morning when he went to bury it, it was gone save a single hoof.

I imagine a doe with fawns is the most vulnerable family group in the forest. No partner, no shelter, packs of hungry coyotes on the prowl, and an under-stimulated dog in every yard.

I spotted the fawns again a few days ago. An immense relief, apart from the fact that they were standing in the middle of the road with (thankfully very patient) traffic accumulating in both directions. The doe stood ground for them all, nosing them toward the shoulder from her position in the center of the lane.

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The Swainson’s thrush has returned to the forest for the spring. The upward spiral of his song fills the day from dawn to dusk, lures me out into the garden first thing each morning. Throughout these late spring days I weed in ten, twenty, thirty minute increments to his tune.

I stop to watch the bumble bees tunneling into and out of foxglove blooms. They have to let go at the lip of each bloom they back out of, which causes them to drop a bit, wings buzzing furiously to lift them again. I take a video in slow motion so I can better see their pollen-loaded haunches and daring drops. I send it to my nephew who shares my delight.

Robins’ eggshells litter the paths, their blue so striking they read as litter for a split second each time we find them. Chartreuse tips cover every fir and hemlock, their flavor as bright as their hue. The madrona’s new growth is the same color in high gloss. Rhododendrons are blooming in jewel tones across the spectrum, the native shrubs on the forest trails bright pink. The lupine add their indigo spires to the colorful line up. Late spring’s palette is a riotous celebration.

The grasses in the meadow – prairie June grass, Roemer’s fescue, meadow barley, blue wild rye, tufted hairgrass – are all seeded. Their textures are as varied as the flowers’ colors and beg to be combed by hand with each pass up and down the stone path. The yarrow, more plentiful on our little patch than any other plant by far, are feathery soft and ready to burst into bloom any day now.

Everyday there is something new to discover. A flower that bloomed in the meadow in the morning’s sun for the first time this year – self heal this morning; a spiraled depression in the long grass where a fawn passed in circles, like a dog, before it bedded down; the dashed iridescence of a slug’s trail looping across the pavers and logs, the silver lining in its destructive wake. The chores are endless but the work is fun. The air is warm, the birds are singing, the hammock is at the ready for cloud spotting.

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If the trill of the Swainson’s thrush is the foreground sound as spring concludes, the approach of wildfire season is the background noise. An annual anxiety since the Beachie Creek Fire burned my beloved Opal Creek Wilderness in 2020, my mind wanders to snow pack and precipitation levels, fuel loads, and summer weather predictions as habitually as my body wanders into the garden this time of year.

I try not to pay too close attention, not to keep a tally, but I can’t help myself. Here on Bainbridge Island we’ve only received 70% of our average rainfall so far this year, and we haven’t entered the dry season yet. The rain events we’ve had have been intense – creating the illusion it’s been a wet year – but intermittent.

The snowpack is even further behind. As Caroline Mellor, Washington State Department of Ecology’s drought lead, commented after a late winter snow storm bumped the state’s snowpack by ten percent, “The Olympics did go from 34 percent last week to 51 percent today, which is a huge jump for a week. That doesn't make 51 percent any less concerning.”

Our neighborhood has just participated in a Firewise program sponsored by the local fire department. A ten yard dumpster was delivered to the terminus of our dead end lane and we had a weekend to fill it before it was hauled off for free. In preparation, Alex spent two weekends limbing the trees in the ravine of their dead branches. The pile he created in the course of doing this work would have filled the ten yard dumpster without the contributions of our neighbors. In the end only about thirty percent of it fit.

The remainder of the deadfall sits where it was hauled, stacked in a pyre next to where the wooden boat is parked on its trailer, under the drying cedar trees. That pile represents maybe a quarter of the work we should do to make our home as fire resilient as possible. Being aware but unprepared feels especially precarious.

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We plan to visit Opal Creek soon, before access is blocked again while a bridge is repaired. We’ve been enlisted to assist in some road repairs. We’re on standby, waiting for a piece of equipment to arrive onsite, ready to head down this week or next.

I remember reading the words of a fire chief describing the destruction up the Opal Creek drainage after the Beachie Creek Fire. “Pretty much worst-case scenario,” he said, “a stand-replacing fire.”

It’s interesting to be on the far side of a worst-case scenario. It feels like an opportunity to practice the kind of curiosity that doesn’t hold on too tightly. I’m dreaming about my any-day-now encounter with this place I love, exploring in the subconscious what it will feel like. It feels appropriate that my first time back to this precious place, which in a grand sense is in a new and precious phase of life, happen in this precious spring season.

And while we wait, I garden. The words of Wendell Berry pace through my mind – a middle note between the thrush and my fire anxiety:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

“I cannot describe with words the emotions that consume me when I see these things.”

Al Philips gestured around from where he sat on a striped chair cushion on the top of a stack of dimensional maple boards covered with a brown tarp, hugging one knee crossed over the other with clasped hands, eyes closed, head tilted skyward.

A brief article in the Bainbridge Island Review from a year ago alerted me to the existence of Dolphin Place Open Space, Philips’ two-acre property on Little Manzanita Bay on the western shore of Bainbridge Island, Washington, where for the last fifty years he has amassed a collection of over 160 native tree and plant species. His monthly tours had filled by the time I looked further into it, so this year I booked early.

Alex and I arrived a few minutes late for our tour on the morning of Sunday, May 19th.

“It’s just the two of you!” Philips said, congenially, as we shook hands. He’d directed us to enter his property under a heavy timber gate and through a massive hollowed-out and roofed cedar trunk, within which hung half of a carved and painted cedar mask.

“There was a Suquamish fishing village here on Little Manzanita Bay,” Philips told us by way of explanation. “Where the Olsen Farm is today, just at the back of this inlet, was the village. They called this place Ratfish Bay in the Native language. I found the mask half submerged and rotting into the soil years ago.” Philips’ land acknowledgement was touching in its informality. He started his story at the beginning, not his beginning here, and there was nothing performative about it.

He handed us each an outdoor chair cushion and motioned for us to sit down on a mossy log. He informed us he’d be having knee replacement surgery in a few days, and he’d start the tour seated – if we didn’t mind – while he gave us some background information.

“When I was a young man, my uncle sent me on a years-long all expenses paid tour of Southeast Asia,” Philips began. “My Uncle Sam,” he clarified, in case we’d missed the inference. “I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t whore, and at the end of my tour I had $8,000. I began looking for a piece of land on the water with the biggest trees I could find.”

Philips bought his two acre property with the money he’d saved while serving in Vietnam. “I wanted to farm,” he continued. “But I didn’t want to farm vegetables, I wanted to farm oxygen!”

He’s a storyteller, we could tell just a few lines in, and he’d told this story before. Dolphin Place Open Space is open for plant tours a couple Sundays each month in the warm late spring through early autumn. After giving us a snapshot of his eclectic career – the Senior Construction Officer for the Navy submarine USS Alaska; selected by the Navy to train as an astronaut (though not selected by NASA, in the end); an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering; a masters degree in physics; a prolific glass artist; an aerospace engineer; a contractor with NASA – he refocused on the native plants we’d come to tour.

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“Enough about me, let’s talk about you!” he said. He opened his eyes – they’d been closed the entire time he recited his story – and looked at us. “You love native plants, yes?”

“Yes!” we replied, eagerly.

“Do you know much about them? How much do you love them?”

“A fair bit!” I replied. “I have an environmental education background and I have a lot of interest and a good start on keeping a native garden at our home.”

“Great! Let’s talk trees first,” Philips said. From there he launched into a two hour tour of every tree and shrub and fern and woodland ephemeral on the sloping property. Alex and I followed him around on narrow pathways through densely planted beds that circled the hillside Philips calls home.

“I have nine distinct ecosystems represented here on this property,” he informed us. In addition to the wet and dry conifer forest conditions that naturally existed on his property, where he started our tour, he showed us how he’d created a variety of conditions along his lowbank shoreline. The mudflats were there when he arrived, but Philips also created a gravel beach, tidal benches with aquatic plant life, and a sand beach. He had a brackish water estuarine pocket with dune grass. He built a tidal pool analog, in which sea anemone had attached themselves and small crabs scuttled about.

Towering over this scene was the oldest tree on the property, a Douglas fir that Philips believes to be a couple hundred years old. Shoreline erosion has exposed one side of the tree’s root system. Philips told us that if he had the money, he’d secure the tree on the upslope side with cables attached to other, firmly rooted trees and special anchor points in the ground.

He rattled off the conditions needed for spring ephemerals when I mentioned a particular interest in their propagation, pointing as he went to where each was tucked. “Saprophytes need downed wood on the ground; rattlesnake plantain wants nothing around it; trillium love leaf litter, they can push through layers and layers of maple leaves when nothing else can – plant them near a maple tree; bleeding heart are an easy transplant, pull them off the side of the road and plant them anywhere; good luck with deerfoot – it’s a tough transplant.”

In the end, our two hour tour of Dolphin Place Nature Space lasted for three and included Philips’ “man-cave,” where he showed us, among other things, the skull of a beaked whale he found on his mudflats years ago, an in-progress ceremonial glass paddle – the replica of one used by a Suquamish elder in dozens of canoe journeys – he had been specially commissioned to make, and a satellite launch port that worked like a soda can pop-top he engineered for a space mission. He showed us his footage of a massive herring run that came into Little Manzanita Bay earlier in the year, a parade of glutenous harbor seals and sea lions in tow.

He showed us his aerospace engineering web page, including conceptual open-source plans for what he calls the Bolo Yoyo Space Habitat. Again and again throughout his website, in what I had already come to recognize as Philips’ signature logical progression, the mantra repeats: Life is a gift \ in our uncertain world \ the future is not guaranteed \ however if we work hard together \ we have a chance \ and that is reason for HOPE.

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Our tour ended with the saga of a nearly 20 ton glacial erratic Philips bought with the $500 he had left over after buying his two-acre lot on Bainbridge Island in 1973. The rock, partially submerged in the earth and surrounded by the once-waterproof lining of a now empty pond (the racoons got to it), was placed before the house was built – Philips’ first signature on this land.

Al Philips and his property defy generalization. A reflection of him, Dolphin Place Nature Space contains multitudes, hints at greatness beneath the surface chaos, is substantive beyond measure. As I sat down to put some words to what was easily the most far-ranging three hour interaction I’ve ever had, I found I had more questions than ideas on where to start.

I emailed Philips a number of them, finally concluding, “I guess I'm trying to take a wider view of the person who cares deeply about the minutiae of ecological conditions in a very specific place, but also hopes to encourage a human migration out into the solar system in the event of this place's (maybe unavoidable, maybe imminent) collapse.”

I received, by way of reply, an invitation to come back over to continue our conversation in person (which Alex and I did the next day) and a page of philosophical poetry, including his reply to my attempt at reconciling his wide-ranging passions:

A big question an observant person might consider. Why work on the plumbing in the toilet if the ship is about to sink. The 40,000 foot landscape view shows; 1) humanity has almost always been at risk; 2) humanity has struggled through somehow, likely due to the imperfect efforts of an enormous number of unappreciated individuals; 3) there is no guarantee that we can continue to bat 1000; 4) but it is guaranteed if we don't try, we are doomed; 5) sometimes, when I don't have the energy to rise up and continue the struggle, there is peace in weeding.