Ground Truth by Ruby McConnell

Author:Ruby McConnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays/Literature
Publisher: Overcup Press
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Out of the Woods

In my mid-twenties I discovered a secluded retreat in the Oregon Cascades, a loosely developed hot springs situated in a dense and remote stand of old growth run by sleepy hippies—Breitenbush Hot Springs. It is a place you either love or hate, depending on your tolerance, alternately, for hot and cold, and the companionship or lack thereof of others. I was hooked at my first visit.

Hot springs are natural effusions of water that emerge to the surface at temperatures hotter than the human body. Most hot springs are related to young volcanoes like those of the Cascade Range. Not all the magma associated with a volcano erupts to the surface. Much of it fills in subsurface voids and faults where it cools over thousands of years. When it rains, water flows down through the ground and encounters the heat from this leftover magma, which warms it, causing it to rise back up to the surface picking up dissolved minerals from the rock along the way. It has long been thought that these mineral-rich waters have healing powers.

Breitenbush was first used for recreational and health purposes by the Native American tribes of the Willamette Valley as early as the 1700s, but it was also frequented by trappers, hunters, and settlers who named it after the one-armed hunter Breitenbush, who was the original homesteader in the early 1800s. The 154 acres is held under private ownership and protected. The surrounding area though, is in a part of the largest timber-cutting district in the lower forty-eight states. Today, there is a tenuous peace agreement between the two. But for the entirety of my lifetime, they were in a near-constant battle started by what was found on a hand-built trail by a lone volunteer.

In the 1980s, stewards of Breitenbush began constructing a network of trails through the old growth with the goal of enhancing public support of their conservation efforts by providing public access to the land. It was this group that first observed a pair of nesting spotted owls. This discovery, along what is now called the Spotted Owl Trail, would lead to the eventual protection of thousands of acres of forest, but not before turning Breitenbush into a hot spot for conflict and radical direct action. That direct action, protestors blocking roads, spiking and occupying trees, and locking themselves by the neck to logging road gates, would characterize the environmental movement of the 1990s. It was a pivotal time period in contemporary environmentalism when the anti-logging movement stopped being about elusive, unprotected owls and the old-growth forests they inhabited and started being about the battle against clear-cuts. With this transition, the era of benign conservation was over.

One Christmas day I woke up early to have breakfast and open presents with my parents, then packed up my things and set off in a light snow for Breitenbush, alone. The weather made for slow going, and it was more than two hours before I turned left off the last plowed road to drive the fifteen winding miles up to the lodge.

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