Breitenbush: After September’s Wall of Fire

On a moonless December night, I sat in a hot pool in a meadow sweeping down to a tumbling river. I raised my hand to my face, and I could see nothing, not the faintest outline. Perhaps this had happened to me before, but it was my first conscious noting of being outside in a dark so complete, and so soft. The absence of light was neither void nor lack, but a presence of its own.

Fifteen years later, those of us on the I-5 corridor, already isolated because of a pandemic, drew even deeper into our houses as smoke swept the skies from wildfires in Oregon, in Eastern Washington, in Canada. On a September night when a waning moon glowed red, the last to evacuate Breitenbush Hot Springs stood on the wooden footbridge crossing that tumbling river and watched the orange flames of the Lionshead Fire roaring toward them through the Willamette National Forest.

Breitenbush, an area of natural hot springs in the mountains east of Salem, served for centuries as a place of indigenous healing. It became a resort spa in the 1920s and then, for a few more decades, was a spot for simple cabins and recreation. Alex Beamer bought the site in 1977 to restore and reopen it as Breitenbush Hot Springs Retreat and Conference Center, in the company of others who wanted to live there in intentional community. In 1989, Breitenbush became a worker-owned cooperative. Using the power and heat of the waters, it has operated sustainably and off the grid, and provided a healing, rejuvenating, and heart-building respite for visitors and residents for forty years.

Many Skagit residents and Co-op members have travelled the road to Breitenbush. We Co-op members have much in common with the Breitenbush community. We share an interest in healthy and sustainable lifestyles, as well as a commitment to a cooperative business model.  And we love the wild rivers that center our communities. At Breitenbush, Skagitonians have sung and swum and danced. We’ve soaked in pools and hiked through forests, balancing on fallen logs to cross water, stretching out on fallen logs to look up at a blue framed by leafy branches. We learned to walk on hot coals without getting burned—some of us figuratively, some of us literally.

Whipped by high winds, the lightning-sparked fire of 2020 burned hot and fast. It blazed through all of the guest cabins, the massage building and the footbridge. The round sanctuary burned to ash. The historic lodge, the commercial-grade villa/kitchen, the office building, the sauna and the meadow pools survived, as did the energy infrastructure. Some of the resident homes burned, some still stand. Those structures still standing were spared through the efforts of two community members and three Breitenbush firefighters who stayed behind to fight the fire.

I have many memories of Breitenbush, reaching back to the early 80s, but all of them begin with the relief sigh of arrival, of unwinding from the car, loading a cart with backpacks and blankets, and wheeling it down the path to a cabin. No matter how hot the day, the cabin was cool under tall cedars, and it is the scent of cedar, pine and fir that told me I was safe, that my shoulders could let loose from hunching around my ears, and I could shed my defenses as easily as shedding clothes to slip into the pools, steam rising.

When the fire hit, Peter Moore, business director and an early founding member, was one of those standing on the bridge. And now? The fire, he says, “took parts and parcels, and left parts and parcels, in a mosaic pattern.”Adds Peter, “You will find meadows where there were forests.”The view, once shadowed by trees, now stretches to mountaintops.

Fire and change have marked this ecosystem for eons. I know this intellectually, but I’ve been clinging to the landscape I loved. Those forests will not rise again in my lifetime. But Breitenbush will. Community members are rebuilding with steady commitment and optimistic spirit. Photos from the spring show jonquils sparking yellow in the shelter of hollowed trunks. I am imagining the beauty of the new cabins being constructed, sitting in a meadow of wildflowers.

The rich compost of fallen logs gives rise to new trees. In the absence, there is presence.

(All those who have loved Breitenbush can visit this link for updated information about the Breitenbush rebuild, including links to donate.)

By Beverly Faxon