A New Beginning at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest

Last year I recorded an episode for the Spring Creek Project’s podcast “Luminaries” about my relationship with fire and water in response to Bill Viola’s installation “The Crossing” which I saw about 30 years ago. My issues with fire stretch way back before that to my childhood in Southern California. I am not a fan of fire and have mostly ignored it with my art. Note that my project for Wildfire + Water is more like Water + Water. I can’t ignore fire any longer.

Now I am embarking on a new project directly relate to wildfire. The HJ Andrews Experimental Forest has been impacted by three recent fires. The Lookout Fire of 2023 was the most damaging to the Andrews Forest, burning over 2/3 of the forest including  several of Oregon’s diminishing old-growth stands.

In May I attended a three-day event in the forest with PRAX’s Fireline Fellows in the role of an artist mentor who has been making work from the Andrews Forest since 2012, supposedly with some insights to offer them about how to approach working creatively with the forest. This task is one I felt entirely incapable of doing. My experience with the forest and theirs felt worlds apart and the forest I knew is now mostly gone. I am as disoriented as they may be.

Last summer I had visited a severely burned part of the Andrews Forest with a group of stream ecologists. It required a fire red card and a chainsaw to access the place. We were all there for the first time since the Lookout Fire of 2023 and we were all curious about what we would find. The forest was decimated and unsettled. We walked up and down Mack Creek looking for recognizable landmarks and markers of their research. The scientists, many of whom I have known for years, were trying to locate themselves and the places they have studied for years, but it had been altered so much that it was disorienting for those who had known it so well.

Mack Creek was a part of the forest I wasn’t familiar with, and I had nothing specific to compare it to. I had no wayfinding to do. I didn’t need to, or even could, reconstruct the place in my mind from memory. I felt sadness and regret for the fate of the forest that had once been so magnificent, but I remained in a state of curiosity while I was there listening to their banter about what they had lost and trying to find their way to what was there now.

My trip in May with the Fireline Fellows was different. Last summer’s excursion did not prepare me for the impact of seeing, for the first time, places that do have deep personal resonance for me in that same forest. The experience rocked me and disoriented me in more than one way. I witnessed a dramatic difference between the Fireline Fellows, all of whom do not have any prior relationship with the place, and those of us who were there who knew the forest well before the fire.

The fellows were in a similar position as I was at the Wildfire + Water residency at Playa. It was a new place, a new landscape, a new ecosystem. The devastating fires were interesting. I remained curious while I was in those burned forests. I felt regret that I had not know the place before the fire. I lamented the dramatic increase of the megafires. But I didn’t feel the overwhelming grief like I did that day in May at those places I had known so well at the Andrews.

When I was with the Fireline Fellows I was too raw to draw on my experiences at Playa or even last summer at Mack Creek. I felt resentment for those who were there who did not know the place and therefore did not feel devastated like I did.  However, I have been in their position too while I was in other places, and not that long ago. How could I expect them to have a reaction to a place they had never known that matched my own in resonance, intensity, and magnitude? It doesn’t really work that way. It wasn’t fair, but it was how I felt.

That day in May underscored the importance and impact of having deep relationships to places. The places work their magic and change you. My new project is exploring this. It is also an ode to the forest that we lost. It is not a lamentation as I first thought it would be, but an inquiry into what lies on the other side of grief.