“Place attachment.” It is a term used in recreation resource management to try to describe the deep and complex emotions felt by those people who frequent an area not because it has the best fishing, or the best weather (although those things can admittedly be factors), but because they have a personal relationship with the land. Scott Russell Sanders said, “We commonly treat homesickness as an ailment of childhood, like mumps or chicken pox, and we treat nostalgia as an affliction of age.” However, like Sanders we find ourselves with deep emotional attachments with the landscapes of our childhoods. These places to us are the places, “…by which we measure every other place.” (Sanders).
My measuring stick is a little property in Canby, Oregon. Well, that is to say, the address is a Canby address though I always had the impression growing up that we were decidedly outside of the influence of the city. It is a place that can be arrived at only after braving a quarter mile long gravel rollercoaster of a driveway that wound its way past pastureland, and lowland boggy forest. The final ascent to the property was an improbably steep hill that was often difficult to navigate in the winter months and required a decent amount of speed to climb successfully. On the left was a flower garden, sometimes impeccably kept, sometimes overrun with blackberries, but in my minds eye, always beautiful, that terminated in a wall of young pine trees at the high end of the hill. On the right and running the length of the lower side of the hill was the beginning of a pine forest; tangled with ivy, overrun with blackberry bushes, invaded by stinging nettle and absolutely perfect. The garden was planted by my mother and maintained by my mother and whichever of her children she could wrangle into helping her. The forest was a gift from God and was maintained by the natural forces that work together in their intricate web of life for the betterment of themselves, for the benefit of themselves. The forest had been there long before me and will be there long after I am gone. However it will forever haunt my memory. It is, as Sanders said “The place by which I measure every other place.”
I felt, not consciously, like a lucky intruder when I broached its boundaries. I remember a still reverence when I wandered the lowlands by the fickle banks of Bear Creek. It is there that I wrote many stanzas of bad poetry, where I struggled with the common ailments of every teenage boy. Issues inconsequential to adults, but life changing to the uncontrolled emotional raging of a dramatic adolescent. I never kissed a girl by those banks. It occurs to me too late in life that it might have been a pleasant thing to do. However, I spent summers catching crawdads in its waters, lighting ground-bloom flowers on the culvert, chasing my runaway dog through the stinging nettle, burrowing through 5 foot tall grass before the owner mowed it with his tractor and living the adventures of Dwarves, Elves, Dragons, Wizards, and Kings. I died a thousand deaths under the canopy of those trees, and I lived a thousand lives. I sat by campfires, slept in a poorly erected tent, slept on a blanket laid on meadow grass, and wandered the forest at night when the wood-scape became not sinister like some strange forests of my experience, but more thrilling.
Those woodlands hold almost no economic value. The timber is not particularly valuable, the lowlands flood a half a dozen times every winter, and the whole forest is full of noxious and invasive weeds. However, I have never entered woodlands to equal them. That is the embodiment of place attachment. When my parents sold the property that bordered it I was devastated. It was a logical move. My parents were getting older and all of us boys had moved out. It was a difficult property to maintain and my mother just did not have the energy to work in the yard for 8 hours every day. I do not blame them, but I will always be heart broken. The forest of my childhood remains the forest of my dreams. I may never get to walk in it again but I will always be loyal to its memory, and as Sanders said, “Loyalty to a place arises…from our need to be at home on the earth.” Now, as an adult, I have a home in Utah, but the forests and lowlands of my Oregon childhood will forever remain my home on earth.
