Shining Light on the Prairie – Summer ‘25

 

It’s not the heat, they say. It’s the humidity.

That’s a tough call when it’s 95°F in the shade and the air’s sopping wet.

For weeks on end, no less.

Not even counting the drought, which multiyear trend continues apace.

How blistering hot air can retain so much moisture for so long without leaking, I don’t know.

Never did much summer landscape work with the Linhof. By & large, that eye found only obscurity in all the green.

This isn't then.

Given the extreme weather, active life tended to lay low this summer.

Often just peeking out from the shade.

By & large, the usual suspects mostly feasted early and late.

That’s the thing about prairie and oak savanna remnants.

The landscape abides through the abundance of life it hosts. That’s how it’s made and perennially remade.

Near summer’s end came intermittent deluges.

In short dramatic bursts over a couple weeks, the air finally wrung itself out.

With that, whole scads of babies followed.

Including this American Dagger moth caterpillar bustling around a tree. Fully two inches long and utterly unperturbed by me.

Whose fuzzy beauty is @ least mildly toxic to the touch. Irritating as all hell, some say.

Which I suppose explains the haughty yellow Hey look at me coat.

Then the first taste of autumn swept in from the north, bringing welcome relief.

Not a moment too soon, I say.

Because now we're all out poking around.

Even as autumn’s first cutting edge is already come to eat.

Blast From the Not So Distant Past

 

Only a few years distant, as seasons go. Definitely before the storm.

Though you could see it from there.

Superior Summer - 2025

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.

Bad River and Terra Vista

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.

Superior Spring - 2025

Officially, meteorological summer began June 1^st. 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.

Shining Light on the Prairie - Spring '25, too

 

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.