In January 2020, Catholic theologian and Andrews Forest writer-in-residence Vince Miller produced an essay with text and selected photographs from David Paul Bayles’s collection, Old Growth Dialog, set in the lush, green old-growth of the Andrews Forest. The essay, titled “A Cathedral Not Built by Hands,” appeared in the journal Commonweal. Little could Miller and Bayles imagine returning to the upper McKenzie valley to collaborate again, only months later, in an effort to comprehend the Holiday Farm Fire. Both struggled with the tragedy and trauma, the side-by-side stark beauty and rapid ecological responses of the forest, which Bayles caught in his photographs, titled “Standing, Still.”
In their second article, “Tears and Ashes: Three Ways of Looking for Hope at the Recent Wildfires in the West,” also published in Commonweal, Miller reflects on human efforts over millennia to find hope in devastation. He visited the burned landscape and spoke with people trying to cope with the loss of homes and ways of life. Miller seeks a “way of seeing adequate to the changed world being revealed in these catastrophes.” He contrasts the perspectives of thinking in “forest time,” the scurry and distractions of everyday life, and an apocalyptic view. Miller aims for an apocalyptic hope with “open eyes, a hard seeing of the truth of circumstance” that can find in “the charcoal remains of a burned tree or a survivor’s trauma…a gateway for truth” in the Anthropocene that demands our attention and action.
Thanks to McKenzie River Trust for giving artists and writers of the Reflections program access to burned forest on their lands along the McKenzie.