That’d be about now. Give or take.
Mostly, early season clouds of biting insects are subsided.
Except when summer overflows.
In which case marauding bug armies linger.
Either way, everybody feasts.
As they must, since each luminous day now grows shorter.
With August, even the most brilliant light throws long across the Northwoods.
So best get while the getting’s still good.
Autumn is coming.
My immigrant ancestors first came to the Superior wilderness long about 1880, at least some of them via the stagecoach.
It was a hard place.
Image courtesy of the Philip J. Kucera collection
The family settled in some twenty-five miles east of the still fairly new Bad River reservation, a sovereign territory established by legal treaty in 1854.
Though of course it'd been indigenous land since the first human got there.
In any event, once my tribe arrived, all along the Gogebic Iron Range the landscape was radically transformed in basically no time at all.
Image courtesy of the Philip J. Kucera collection
While on and around Bad River land it never was, much. All the way
to today.
1955, foreign oil giant Enbridge lays 645 miles of pipeline across sovereign U.S. territory, primarily to transfer a steady wealth of Canadian oil and gas from
one part of Canada to another.
2013, the legal easement for that leaky line to cross
roughly 12 miles of Bad River land ended. The tribe told the company
to pack up its poorly maintained pipeline and go home.
Thanks to the Wisconsin Citizen's Media Cooperative
Foreign oil giant Enbridge simply said ‘No.’
2019, the Bad River Band sued Enbridge, claiming not only that the Company
was trespassing but that the aged line was just one major flood event away from presenting an existential threat to their indigenous
way of life.
2023, the U.S. District Court agreed on both counts, yet gave the company until June 2026 to close down and get the hell off tribal land.
The way things are going these days, I’ll not bet the rent.
Meanwhile, on another side of the world…
Terra Vista – a Brazil se Fato documentary
My dear friend Avital’s daughter Noa Cykman is brilliant. Soon to be a Ph.D. The fruit didn’t fall far from that tree, for sure.
Noa’s 2024 documentary Terra Vista allows a long abused native people to speak for themselves and on their own behalf, as they work toward reestablishing stewardship over both their culture and the ancestral environment it sprang from.
The native landscape long ravaged by commercial exploitation was returned to the locals only after their land was deemed spent. Cykman’s fine film tells what’s essentially a positive story, even given the historically grim context.
Today these folk are reclaiming what’s always been theirs, way of life included. It’s hard work, as you’ll imagine. And the landscape will never again be what it once was. Neither, I suppose, will they.
But they’ll make do.
Because indigenous resilience in the face of everything is the natural way of the world.
*
The past is irretrievable.
At best, it’s our teacher. At
worst a lie people cling to, as if magical thinking might somehow someday actually save us from ourselves.
The future but a dream.
Anyone tells you otherwise is
lying or stupid. All too often, both.
Only now is everything that counts.
As knowledge applied (or not) today steadily shoves our future forward, all together.
Officially, meteorological summer began June 1st.
Most years on the prairie, ‘summer-like’ conditions roughly coincide then
settle in for the duration.
Around Superior, hidden cuts along rivers and other sheltered
spots might still harbor snow. That was the case this year in the Northwoods,
right through at least the end of May.
Way back, an old timer told me Upper Peninsula summer is three days in July.
He’s not always been wrong.
Superior spring, whether late arriving or overstaying her
welcome, typically overflows.
And many times, the finest treasures are well hidden.
Or not.
Whichever, seasonable resurrection exacts a perennial price and the true splendor of spring ‘round Superior is that it wakes up so very, very hungry.
For instance...
At a hidden place, a small creek emerges briefly from deep
woods to help feed my favorite lake and other things besides.
Didn’t know the spot existed until fairly late in the game.
First time I lugged the Linhoff in was strictly a learning
experience. There’s not much stable footing back there. Light proved
problematic and the complex visual geometry doesn’t readily lend itself to the
limitations of a frame.
I went home with no usable film of this well-hidden place.
Second year’s effort was a complete & utter failure.
No sooner had I set up my gear than a fierce cloud of mosquitoes set about eating me alive, so I hightailed it back to the car lickity split. No fool me, eh?
Way back, an old timer told me U.P. state bird's the mosquito.
He was and is right. But I was determined. Stupid mosquitoes.
The following spring, I ventured in wearing a biting insect hazmat suit.
It was clumsy. Inconvenient, especially the netting across my
face, which made focusing through ground glass via a loupe a novel experiment.
Then I shot a lot of film, just trying to be sure.
Third year proving the charm, I finally did capture on 4x5 transparency
a reasonable facsimile of the seasonal wonder that for three springs running, inexorably drew me back.
And here that hidden place is, less marauding mosquitoes.
I was tempted to shrug and say, just ‘cause.
Except now it’s a couple fleeting weeks later.
And in the interim, it rained.
Not enough to break the drought, it’s true.
But still.
Land looking.
Finally.
Running late, the prairie is just now greening.
It deals differently with drought than shaded woods.
Caught in gentle half-light, the forest floor ripples with life.
Along the demarcation line between prairie and wood
where sun/shade sharply comingle,
at last…
spring explodes.
By special request, a not quite random selection of work drawn from my large format back catalogue. Have added some notes, along with a single digital image for good measure @ the end. Also captured in situ, as of course was the film.
No VFX need apply in real time, or until authenticity is made irrelevant by progress.
Until then, that's why god created perspective control:
My 1st ever shoot with the Linhof consisted of ten exposures, all Ottawa National Forest botanicals. That's where we were and what was there. Seeing the film later, I could sort of tolerate three of the ten.
The next step on my large format learning curve came when I hauled 120 sheets of 4x5 transparency with me to Switzerland. Even though I'd barely any clue as to what I was doing.
In for a penny in for a pound, I
guess.
After three weeks of guessing plus
another week waiting on the film, not only had I succeeded @ a better than 2:1
ratio, what I’d be shooting going forward had been set in stone.
And so much for spending a lifetime
working from my knees, praying for some plant to stop moving, finally clicking the
shutter, then finding out days or even weeks later whether or not it actually had.
I took my master class in large
format, architectural fieldwork primarily @ two separate, though hardly equal
historic sites.
Old World Wisconsin, a collection of vintage structures plucked from other places, gathered together and preserved as a museum
exhibit:
And the old copper mining town of Victoria, the very definition of vintage aging in place.
This is called 'Victoria Flies' for good reason, not readily seen via your phone:
It was @ an historic site along
the north shore of Lake Huron that I figured out Ektachrome could shoot high
contrast imagery in the mostly dark. Though if you look closely enough, you’ll see that even
dead geese waft in the slightest breeze.
Unleashed, I found other
treasures in the wild field. Shipwrecks don’t move per se, except sometimes Superior swallows them. When you make it all the way in lugging 50# on
your back and find it hasn’t, you damn well better score.
I was there to shoot something
else and this property’s private, not abandoned, so I passed it by three times
in the rain before at the end of the day pulling over on the public road, jumping
from the car and grabbing a quick shot just the same.
Turned out, this single sheet of
film is far better rendered than any of the other work I’d gone there to
do.
Take advantage of every
opportunity as presented, since the next time what you see might well be gone.
This black beauty was, when I returned.
Grab excellence whenever you
can get it, even if ad hoc & on the fly…
Once we’d traveled up the
Bayfield peninsula for to shoot, but the skies poured down rain. We sat in a
lakeside café while I bemoaned cruel fate.
Then this appeared. I bolted, threw
my gear together on the sodden pier, and desperately fired off four sheets.
It’s the only 4x5 I ever paid a
specialist to scan, as no one including myself could get out of the film what I
knew was in there.
Avoid filling your phone with sunrise/sunset images. While those can be undeniably gorgeous, they're just memories that outside the moment become indistinguishable, one from the other. So live it, instead.
Except on that rare occasion when the magic hour creeps in on little cat's feet and you're there well prepared, hoping for exactly that.
Then, strike.
Don’t neglect your roots, those
nourish and inform you. But never tie yourself too tightly to those, either.
Consider that as corporeal time
itself runs short, all construct fails with time.
And when chased down by the pack
of ravaging wild dogs we call progress, by all means spit in its face by acing
your last chance.
Then let it go.
Because when clinging tight to
what was, what will be turns even the wisest old owl to stone, rendering it
useless to ongoing need.
But by embracing the future come
what may, even old men might again learn to fly.
Mourning Dove Under Glass
