Revolution, 2016

The Superior Basin is loaded with field-to-table farmers, hunters and fisher folk. For the majority of those, that's just what comes of being born to multigenerational poverty in rural isolation. Like most people everywhere always, of necessity they play life's hand as dealt the best they can.

The same punishing remoteness that makes so many young locals desperate to escape nonetheless draws a steady stream of refugees to it. For them this modern approximation of an old way of life is a choice. These include all manner of people from neo-hippies to alt-right malcontents who for their own reasons reject the too often mutually exclusive demands of everyday American life.

For still others, the choice of life lived in accommodation with a difficult place represents a profound personal commitment to blaze trail toward a more sustainable future, so that the rest of us might follow. Which happy thought brings me to Claire Hintz, smiling in Mexican mud…

Spring, 2013

Elsewhere Farm is on the far reaches of the Bayfield Peninsula, down a piece from Cornucopia. My visit there in 2013 was intended as the first stop for a suite of essays on the cultural, economic, intellectual and artisanal progress of the greater region, with Ashland and Northland College serving as nexus for the narrative.

The Lake Superior Binational Forum at Northland had been kind to me along my way. I wanted to return the favor. And whether in Canada or the States, I knew no other Superior community in so vigorous pursuit of a sustainable future as is this post-industrial patch of northernmost WI.

That brilliant spring afternoon at aptly named Elsewhere Farm, Claire Hintz fairly dazzled me with her combination of academic knowledge, applied intellect, insight, industry and courage.

It wasn't simply the efficient, 'low tech' greenhouse. Or that with a wave of her hand Farmer Claire purged from this prairie kid vestigial sodbuster notions about working wet land. It wasn't just the warm, inviting home filled with books and specialized paraphernalia, an environment that particularly suits me. Or the staggering amount of wealth Claire noted the locals ship from the region each and every year in trade for food made somewhere else, most often by person or persons unknown.

Not even the Icelandic chickens that make such good sense on so many levels I'm still gobsmacked they aren't more commonplace made my day. Normally, those alone would've sufficed.

As it happened I spent only that single afternoon in the field, officially the last of the Odyssey. Too ill to continue, the next morning I raced back to the prairie and so much for the remainder of 2013. Later, the Lake Superior Binational Forum got stripped of funding, as indicative of our times. I've not returned to the area since and wouldn't know what to write about it, today.

Because of all that and more, the application of high level learning mixed with pancultural common sense then with altogether rigorous determination sown upon the wilds of the Bayfield Peninsula for right reasons made Elsewhere Farm emblematic of the finest, most enduring aspects of our American character. In other words, exactly the sort of thing we collectively like to brag on as indicative of us, but too rarely do we engage the sustained hard work to fully realize. Except there Elsewhere Farms is, just the same.

So fresh and full of promise in spring of 2013, I trust Claire Hintz's orchard has since gone on to bear fruit accordingly. It's important work.

*

The Industrial Revolution that carried us to here took full flight on the notion of Earth as inexhaustible, thus unassailable in any meaningful way by our puny selves. That's the operative concept from which modern America and its attendant liberties sprang. Earth provides, we harvest then build and call it progress. By virtue of geology and an accident of timing the Superior Basin features a rich array of evidence that it's so.

Most everything we rely on for our lives and good fortune remains dependent on this idea that perpetual harvest makes for inevitable progress.  Even though we know better about nearly all things than we did in the 19th Century, when perpetual maintenance of an industrialized civilization was made our prime directive. And with the greater part of what we knew then since proven silly in light of what we know now, not the least being that human knowledge must be taken for provisional.

What's demonstrably true is we aren't nearly as smart as we like think and what's more, never were.

Algerian Desert Art, Wikipedia Commons

This spring introduced me to the phrase Slow Food. It's generations since most folk in the States had to run down their food at any speed and at first, the term confounded me. Turns out Slow Food's a fresh label slapped on an old idea in the hope overwhelmed consumers pause to reconsider its ancient wisdom anew.

It's strange to me that a concept so fundamental as the first seed sown or the first beast nurtured by humans to make for slower food requires rebranding to maintain relevance, especially in these our hard times. Whatever plant or critter those might've been, today through this transaction of longstanding one is unlikely to know the other at a glance, for what they've each become. Not plant or beast or human too and never again, I suppose.

On faith I'd like to take the essential idea of food and its production as at least second nature to the species by now but apparently, alas. Real food gets renamed Slow Food as cultural Kryptonite to Fast Food and the plainly unsustainable era of human life that label represents. It's a strange world we've made, with Kryptonite aplenty but no Superman in sight. And so it goes.

Back when we were just apprentice Masters of the World, Thomas Jefferson believed mastodons still roamed the American West, though he'd mistakenly thought them mammoths. 

As perhaps the prime intellectual architect of the American Experiment and for his time a mighty bright man all around, Jefferson knew there'd been mammoths/mastodons. But until late in his own life, he didn't know near enough to ever imagine them gone.

Thomas Jefferson, extinction denier so necessarily a believer in mastodon inexhaustibility, died on July 4th 1826. A mere fourteen years later Douglas Houghton marked the birth of the nation by blowing La Roche Verde to smithereens. Steeped in raw opportunity and driven by abject ignorance, America's rush to her industrialized future was officially on.

Knowledge is power unanswerable to wealth or political influence. It bows before no elite, not populist or intellectual or oligarch. No matter that once we took errant self-evidence as proper foundation upon which to build a great land of the free, home to the brave. Since 1776 and until the day we see fit to surrender our hard-earned liberty, what we do or don't do with this bounty of constantly refreshed knowledge rests squarely on each one of us.

By whatever label, the operative concept behind the global local food movement is that when you personally know where your food comes from, how it was made and who made it, you're vastly more likely to live better, longer. All the while contributing to a locally sustainable economy, a notion proven to float most folk's boats along their way. And you'll help stanch the critical bleeding of Earth's now demonstrably finite natural wealth in the bargain.

Because what Thomas Jefferson and the lineage of Nation builders who followed him along the trail of Manifest Destiny didn't know turned out to be a lot. Today, it's common knowledge that the Eden we depend on for our lives and the future of god's supposedly chosen children isn't inexhaustible after all.

Elsewhere Farms demonstrates yet again that the people of the Superior basin possess a generosity of spirit and individual industry that perpetually renews the power of the People. It reveals the politics of division pimped by demagogues of despair as a self-destructive indulgence. This spirit and willingness to work hard for no good money against daunting odds on a landscape that doesn't forgive and for a larger culture that doesn't much care gives lie to the raw cynicism these days driving entirely too much of the national conversation about the state of our American character.

Of course the real world's a scary place. It's why we've spent thousands of years building a civilization of increasingly complex walls, literal and figurative. How is that news to anyone?

Possessed of the talent and blessed with the means to incrementally insulate and provisionally secure ourselves from the vagaries of both nature and our neighbors, we do. But never kid yourself about who pays accrued interest on what and to whom for the pretense of keeping real world consequences at bay, or that the bill's not about to come due in full regardless.

Planet of the Apes

Every dollar not spent today will tomorrow save no one from the fast rising cost of our collective past. Not rich or poor, left or right, agitated, complacent or confused will be spared but that our massive accumulation of strictly theoretical wealth is now devoted to the real life pursuit of critical knowledge and its immediate, practical application.

Consider that, the next time some pandering yahoo grasping for political power whines about intellectual elites. Or scientific bias. Or when some pipsqueak politician in order to justify further reducing the People's share of the People's wealth claims that mere national debt is the most dire threat to the future of America's children.

The Mastodon is dead. So too, is Thomas Jefferson. And that is the news.

Yet critical lessons remain to be learned from the living legacy of each before the American Experiment can ever be fairly claimed a failure by anyone also interested in truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or reasonable, contemporary facsimile.

Any revolution that can't feed itself over the long haul is doomed to fail, food security being essential to the effort. A far flung and still obscure but not inconsiderable number of your fellow Americans are currently working hard to help remedy that. They come from all corners and cut across every demographic, even if you neither know nor care that they exist.

The change many of you think you desire is already here, though probably not exactly as you'd like it. Tough beans. Evidence abounds. There is but to look, listen, learn and move forward as best we can, united in common cause and finally unbound from obsolete verities drawn of profound ignorance then purposefully evolved over time to best serve a wide variety of vested interests that mostly don't include you.

The facts of extinction proved so radically at odds with his notion of self that Thomas Jefferson could only reject self-evident truth. Evidence strongly suggests a lack of dark imagining is no longer at issue in the American body politic.

Among other things, the Boy Scouts of America taught me to Be Prepared.

So during this radical political season dominated by angry voices arguing over nettlesome choices while otherwise mainlining an apparently inexhaustible supply of toxic trivia, here's a suggestion for everyone thinking of voting for what's been labeled as righteous change but realistically promises only further division leading to deepening chaos:

If like most of us you're unable to feed yourself and your family, or to help feed your immediate neighborhood for the duration as needed, don't.

Truth is, you're woeful unprepared for what you think you want. As are the majority of your neighbors. All the good work now engaged by other citizens to better prepare our postindustrial grassroots for a healthier, more sustainable revolution notwithstanding.

Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it good and hard. And as HL Mencken suggested, you'd deserve it...

Shades of (mostly) Blue

I've been worried about my pollinators.

Bearded Iris (Iris Hybrida)

February was mild and March proved downright warm, at least for March. Hope scented the prairie air. The first queen bumblebees took the bait.

Two of the last three years we've hosted a bumblebee nest beneath our back porch. They can be imprecise navigators and fun to watch as they try to make the tiny access hole on the fly. They sometimes bump into the wall, fall to the ground and with the coolness of a cat, parade on through the portal to deliver up their golden booty to dark sanctuary.

Bumblers are curious sorts too, especially when young. I've had them fly by, stomp on the brakes then pull a u-turn in mid-air, all to come back and take a hovering look at my face. That's quite the thing and for a host of reasons, we're glad to have them. Typically, bumblebees don't return to the same nesting spot the next season, so I expect this is our year off. But the old woodpile remains and institutional memory is strong. By the end of March there the Queens were, trying to scrounge a living off of hard times.

April began as about what you'd want out of spring on the prairie – a warming sun, the fresh blush of green everywhere and of course, dandelions. The first Red Admiral butterflies appeared then. I left most of the dandelions alone and saw bumblers on them early. Then spring took a sudden, nasty turn and everyone was just gone. March weather set in to eat the rest of April and a big chunk of May in the bargain.

Weeks on end of cold and wet laid life on the prairie low. Daffodils came and went, as did the tulips. Up north, in unseasonable weather Alberta burnt. Smoke from that fire bled sunsets red over the prairie, where on my little patch nothing further blossomed and no pollinators came. Though it renders them useless for the table, I left my spring chives to bloom.

Chive (Allium scoenoprasum)

Then as happens, things changed. The heat that held Alberta's feet to the fire broke and a more 'normal' spring pattern set in, mid-continent. As also happens, by then it was creeping toward June and late winter turned to full on summer in a trice. Tomorrow in Fort McMurray Alberta, for the first time since the spring burn began, residents will be allowed back in to see what's left. It's not much.

Meanwhile, the Bearded Iris's got enthusiastic.

I've long wanted to give macro photography a go. The Linhof provided the ideal tool for that, but I was too busy mucking around in the ruined architecture of faded cultures to ever spare the considerable effort for a flower. Now that I'm a digital imagist I'll unlikely ever again enjoy the depth of field Zeiss glass on the Linhof would've provided for botanicals, but neither will I again risk life, limb and 4x5 gear over the side of a canoe to shoot water lilies at Bobcat Lake, so there's that. And I'm happy as a clam to finally possess complete control of the experiment.

Exquisite geometry flows through the heart of my finest architectural work. Turns out, the same basic principles transfer to my basement and dead things. Hot damn.

During unseasonable warmth predicted to fail day after tomorrow, a week or so ago spiderwort blossomed on my patch of prairie. I watched for bees and saw none. This morning after a Cooper's Hawk took a sparrow with dawn and the spiderwort later awoke, when harvesting a bloom that so early in life has yet to reveal the true devil's face of the plant, a bumblebee, a honey bee and a busy little something so tiny I could just barely guess it actually was a bee, all worked the same stand of spiderwort.

Spiderwort (Tradescantia – likely – virginiana)

Some years ago I took a lupine transplant from my dear friend Will's yard up near the Big Lake and planted it in mine. Forced too far outside its natural borders, lupine typically doesn't make a good refugee. Over the course of five years the transplant traveled of its own accord. The thing threw decent stems and leaves as it wandered but refused to bloom and thus represent the wilderness I miss so, when on the prairie.

Finally, last year and apparently happy in the corner of the garden it chose just behind Mr. Lincoln's rose, the lupine bloomed. This year my northwoods refugee is positively at home in its own little patch of the greater world.

Lupine (Lupinus perennis)

If only we could all claim the same, eh?

Sadly, I didn't make it up to Lake Superior this spring. I mightn't make it this summer, either. Hope holds out for autumn, when the Gogebic Range is cloaked in cold, wet fog and colorful ghosts dance on a grey breeze. Last autumn we spread northwoods lupine seeds on the prairie garden in time for the freeze and no few of those took. They probably won't bloom this year but the little buggers give me something to look forward to near the end of next winter, god willing and the creek don't rise.

A few minutes ago, while watching a squall line bear down on the prairie, I spotted my first Red Admiral butterfly in a month. Sure, it fought the wind to gain shelter and hold on through the storm. I lost track of it in a gust, but trust that it did.

Tomorrow is the first day of meteorological summer, while today spring passes through a storm. It's gonna be a hot one. Maybe soon the hyssop will bloom and the bumblebees will again feel at home...

Jim Harrison, 1937 – 2016

         The legal provenance of this image is obscure. Should the owner desire its removal, speak & consider that done.
To the photographer, well done indeed.

How does one wish Rest in Peace to one of the most relentlessly restive spirits of American letters?

James Harrison was a poet, a gourmand of note, an essayist, cranky literary critic and pal of Jack Nicholson. Along with John Voelker, Harrison is one of two great American authors to explore the wilds of the Upper Peninsula in prose, in depth and consistently nail it. Each man did that with rare insight, singularly American humor and a profound humanism that they applied with great craft to story.

Voelker was born in the U.P. and Harrison wasn't, so my native sympathies must lean to the Judge. But Jim Harrison is nobody's second. He was a man who lived on the U.P. better than most folk not born there ever can and he revisited the place in life and in penetrating prose over and over and over again. No matter that the old man died in Arizona. Snowbirds do that.

During the Odyssey, with a handful of other tourists I went to the overlook at Summit Peak in the Porkies, duty called. Near the end of a long day on the road the climb up the hill then up the stinkin' tower just to see more woods was arduous. Still, from the top of the tower there's more wilderness than the eye can readily wrap around, all of it rolling into the south shore of a magnificently indifferent freshwater sea. The sun was bright, a light breeze cleansed the sweat from us and as tourists do, we talked.

I walked down that hill with a married couple a few years older than my peers. It was fun. They were smart. Witty. Well traveled. Flush when most everyone else wasn't and enjoying the hell out of that, you could just tell. Yeah, I know. But you could. And it bears mentioning.

Near the parking lot somehow the conversation turned to Jim Harrison, whom the woman wished dead.

It went approximately like this:

Harrison blames what happened to the Indians on us. He's decrepit and on death's door out in the desert, good riddance.

It was a hard turn to an otherwise pleasant conversation between passing strangers. I bid the couple travel safely, thinking: Any writer that hated has done one helluva job.

It would've been sometime in 2012.

I've thought about that woman often, since then. Especially with each new Jim Harrison book that came after, which by rough count includes two new collections, two novels, a book of poetry and the Brown Dog collection, complete with an entirely appropriate and satisfactory ending to the long winding story of Harrison's most fully realized and sympathetic character. Good Lord, the man's river flowed at the end.

We should all be so decrepit, eh lady?

Jim Harrison left us a particularly rich and robust body of work. His spirit will remain restive so long as the words we live on live on. That'd be about how he wanted it, I figure.

In any case, tonight glasses are lifted in his honor in Grand Marais and other places all over the world. Harrison liked the good life and make no mistake. I don't know if his was a life well lived or not, that's not for me to say. What's true is that the man lived it large and came bearing gifts.

Godspeed, Jim Harrison. Thank-you.

Calling All Artists...

Dan's Cabin
120mm transparency, 2012

Thursday March 31st is the deadline for creatives to submit their work for consideration to the 2016 Artist in Residence Program hosted by the Friends of the Porkies in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness of Michigan.

If selected you'll spend up to three weeks nestled in a splendid cabin, just off a sparsely traveled trail through some of the most pristine wilderness that remains in the upper Midwest.

The Friends are gracious hosts. My time there in October of 2012 was among the best two weeks of my life. I did some of the finest work of my life, while there. Everything in the slide show below that's from "Ontonagon County" was captured during my stay at Dan's Cabin as a guest of the Friends. The work from the Keweenaw too, which while normally about as remote a place as one can get in the Midwest, is just a day trip from Dan's Cabin.

Both I and my art came away inestimably enriched by the Residency experience. What's better than that?

I dropped in here today to tout the program because I'm committed to it, as I intend to be so long as I and it survive. My residency was that good, in all ways.

Upon review, I've already written so much about the Porkies and my stay at Dan's Cabin that we'd best rely on that. So while I apologise for filling this post with links to previous posts, those serve our purpose here.

Follow the links below, as you will. If you've questions, I've likely supplied a few answers. If you've doubts about submitting, those should be assuaged.

If you're unfamiliar with the Porcupine Mountains, start with these so you'll know where you are:

Lake of the Clouds @ Sunrise

4x5 transparency, 2003

The Porcupine Mountains -- Part 1 & Part 2 

Then travel on to Dan's Cabin and my residency there:

120mm transparency, 2012

Home is Where the Heart Is, Creative Conversation and Resident Artifacts.

Finally, let's revisit Nonesuch, which is in the park and just down the road from where you'll stay, if selected.

Nonesuch Cornice

Digital Capture, 2012

Opportunity for creatives might seem rich these days, but most of that doesn't occur in the real world and on the occasion one comes along, just try getting someone else to defray the lodging portion of your freight for choosing to get out and work in it.

And if the images I've chosen here make the place seem resolutely gloomy, well, sometimes it is. You're just down the road from mighty Superior, which makes its own weather after all. And I typically shot only transparency film besides. Consequently, high contrast scenes were only rarely my friend.

But rest assured, the sun shines bright on the Porcupine Mountains too:

Division

120mm transparency, 2012

I say go for it. Time's a fleetin', after all...

The First Day of Spring

Happy spring!

Pasque flower (I believe)

McHenry County Il, 2015

Nikon 800e

Some of you might think, "What's up with this guy? The vernal equinox is still twenty days away." And of course, that's true. But today is the first day of what's called meteorological spring, which is mighty official sounding just the same.

Besides, by the time we get to now on the calendar I've about had it with winter. Sure, March is an often brutal month when stubborn winter puts the hammer down just to prove it still can. Around Superior, winter's recalcitrance can last into June. But here on the prairie I'm done waiting on the good news. What with today the official first day of spring to the weathermen and all, I find that suits me just fine too.

The Great Reveal

Seasonal wetland

Gogebic County Mi, 2015

Nikon 800e

People will tell you the best time to see what's typically hidden in the woods is winter, but that discounts the snow that not only makes for hard going, it also covers the ground. I think the best time for wandering around to see what normally can't be seen occurs in late autumn after the trees have shed their leaves and then again, in early spring.

So here's a short selection of sights you'd never see, were they not briefly revealed by the lingering nakedness of winter...

Outflow from Bobcat Lake

Gogebic County MI, 2015

Nikon 800e

Grand Kankakee Marsh Bird's Nest

Lake County In, 2014

Nikon 800e

A month later on the calendar from when these images were captured and you'd never know this is there:

Abandoned Mill

McHenry County IL, 2014

Nikon 800e

Biggest tadpoles I've ever seen in the wild were found in that pothole beneath this wheel when I was a little kid...

Water Wheel

McHenry County IL, 2014

Nikon 800e

Finally, maybe my favorite hidden place ever. It's not that it's location is unknown. Or even that the creek is seasonal, it isn't. Instead this gem of a canyon is reached by travel through deep woods that cling precariously to hard terrain. Now that the resolutely crappy but only road leading back there is gated, the place might just as well be on the moon, whatever season...

Gogebic County MI, 2011

4x5 transparency film

In just a few weeks, April showers will engage their mission to bring May flowers and in the Northern Hemisphere, the world will again be seen as new. From about now until June busts out all over and again cloaks the passionate secrets of summer in abundance, this is every year's prime viewing season.

Welcome the great, annual reveal of life following death. Today is as good as any to start. Go out and look around, what you find might surprise you. In any event, by all means do your best with every splendid day spring gives you, while it lasts.

Hot times are coming soon enough.

Some Clowns...

Hundreds of dark miles distant, Superior rolls on. There it awaits the raging winter storm that as I write throws a sharp blanket of ice over everything 'round these parts, concrete and remnant prairie both. It's a good night to make like a cricket and hold close to the hearth.

Up north, most creatures not already fled south for the winter lay low with the dark season's apex. Down here even during an ice storm, what remains of the prairie provides sustainable sustenance and shelter to a riotously diverse and fiercely competitive population. When still a sea of grass upon which white folk hadn't sailed, the prairie supplied everything for some of us too. We outgrew the space.

Once the fieldwork that made this project ended, I returned to the landscape that raised me and as regards the great Northwoods am again just another transient. The lush wilds of Superior brim with those during spring summer and fall but not so much otherwise because who in North America wants to fly north for the winter? In some ways I'm yet to fully regain my bearings from such prolonged and intimate exposure to so formidable and complex a landscape as the Superior Basin, though I understand better than ever that wherever I might be, for me Superior is true north.

Things Growing from Other Things #4

Ontonagon County, MI, 2012

120mm transparency film

A reintroduction is in order, as our menu has recently changed.

I was until recently a shooter of large format film, even then an archaic craft. I made a longtime specialty of heritage architecture being steadily reclaimed by wildness around the Superior Basin. Now I'm a multidisciplinary creative (freelance division) just like damned near everybody else.

Individuals always have had their own unique way of looking at things, their personal vision. By and large they kept that to themselves, as barriers to entry beyond casual creative expression ran high. These days anyone with half an inclination expresses their personal vision then distributes it at will to the same rollicking ether where all individual uniqueness gets uploaded to market on roughly equal footing and making a decent living from one's creative wits is too often just a happy accident.

Things Growing from Other Things #7

Iron County WI, 2015

Nikon 800e

When I took up my last large format journey around Lake Superior, regional galleries offered fine art prints struck from film and at a good price. Fourteen months later, where those galleries displayed any photographic prints at all they were digital capture, tucked away from high traffic patterns and peddled cheap. Now that's what you call turnover.

Likewise when I set out, shooters specializing in wrecked architecture were relatively rare. Fewer still worked in medium or especially large format transparency. That club was naturally self- limiting.

Dickson County MI, 2012

120mm transparency film

Except about the same time my personal/professional Odyssey around Superior was over, buses guided groups of tourists through ruined Detroit. Today for a fee people gather at the edges of generational despair to compile on their whiz-bang devices virtually undifferentiated catalogues of what some now refer to as ruin porn.

Suddenly, the field I'd enjoyed working in relative solitude grew if not exactly crowded then no longer a rare pursuit, either. Two pair of casual Sunday shooters came and went during the couple hours last September that I worked this ruin up on the Keweenaw. A fifth digital imagist arrived as I left.

Center Cut

Houghton County MI, 2015

 Nikon 800e

Guess I'll just have to wander farther afield.

Creative narrative often develops an organic life of its own. With the film and me too exhausted, it seemed the right time for this one to close as planned. Then an opportunity unexpectedly arose to acquire the Nikon and lo & behold, I wasn't a retired imagist after all. Story is stubborn, even willful. So it is with the ether life of this one, no less than the analytics support that.

Natural, historical, cultural and personal stories are what our narrative is made of. What our narrative amounts to, we are.

Look to Longfellow, Hemingway and even the curious history of the Ontonagon Boulder for examples of how creative liberty when taken with cultural narrative generationally alters what's commonly accepted for fact. Wholesale invention worms its way into our collective narrative and we act upon its compounding infelicities as if they were true. Then consider the sublime coexistence of geologic truth with Ojibwa cultural imperative, in which approximate harmony one can choose to believe they each confirm the other, or not. Small wonder so many folk these days don't seem to know whether we're coming or going.

Some Clowns Just Want to Watch the Circus Burn (Detail)

Houghton County MI, 2015

Nikon 800e

Ours is a radical era during a revolutionary age. The loudest, most persistent voices among us shout out the danger of our times, often for reasons in mutual opposition. Fear is a contaminant. It permeates the air and has the predator in us edgy. But what time since the beginning of time hasn't been dangerous?

If our age is more threatening than others of recent vintage, it's only that we choose to make it so. The maddeningly complex and frequently absurd dichotomies that propel living human narrative forward are on us, there's no one else. While our ancient cousin the wolf watches warily from those narrow margins of the real world left it as we unfold...

Vintage 35mm chrome of a captive Grey Wolf

The Superior Basin overflows with narrative sprung organically from the earth over the length of worldly time. The first humans to see the place were likely immigrants skirting desert plateaus of ice heaped upon a region where well outside collective memory volcanoes once raged.

By the time we arrived, mountains that rose over the place after the volcanoes subsided were worn down to nubs. Wolf, bear, eagle and a host others had long since earned relative prosperity from a naturally hard terrain. The ice receded. Some people stayed to work copper scraped from veins left exposed to human invention by the ravages of age.

The superior nature of the basin later drew a succession of predatory characters who writ their stories large upon the culture. The fur trappers of legend & lore. Followed by miners, lumbermen and other takers who took much from the place for to craft civilization as we've grown accustomed to it in the blink of an old growth forest's eye.

That was a particularly robust chapter, widely celebrated in story and song. Being only so recent it still clings to us as we do to it and damn the pesky torpedoes anyway, full speed ahead.

The Kingston Plains

Alger County MI, 2012

120mm transparency film

That predatory thread bleeds uncorrected right through into today's radicalized chapter of the story. Our own takers insist the mere existence of critical natural resources no matter how permanently dwindled or damaging the extraction requires we surrender those to unsustainable ends or face certain doom sooner, rather than later. Far as that goes they're about right, of course. But their way, our way of life still requires us killing all of it simply to survive until the day it's our turn.

And what the hell kind of a plan is that?

Worse, the takers use punitive politics to press their unsustainable case even while grabbing everything they can for themselves from the rest of us. At their prerogative that includes the viable economic lives of good people who answered the call and joined them at cold, hard Superior to over the course of generations help bring the varied blessings of our modern world to America and in the name of everyone, not just some few.

The wolf, bear, eagle and Indian. The miner, logger and every other immigrant who for whatever reason first were drawn to this wild place rightly called Superior, they struggle individually and all against each other to maintain an ancestral hold on its ever changing landscape of immemorial magnificence. 

Roughly that same tale is told across the rest of the world today. What's true is that there's only one earthly story and here we are, in it all together. Everything under the sun has its part to play, separate but equally besieged during a revolutionary age.

When I finished the fieldwork that made this project, I returned both injured and ill to the landscape that raised me. Recovery proved difficult. In the interim I turned 60, realized recovery was forever after a strictly relative term and that altered my perspective.

Hanging Man

Wolverine/Mohawk Keweenaw County MI, 2015

Nikon 800e

At any rate, it strikes me as no good time to be retiring because how our chapter of the ongoing story plays out is on me, as it is on you. Ours is a radicalized era during a revolutionary age, when a multitude of fear whipped by self-interest competes for anything like fresh air and the predator in us is sore restless, what with the raging fire and all.

We ought better consider that to the prairie and forest both, fire is a friend.

 

Ladder Crew

Wolverine/Mohawk Keweenaw County MI, 2015

Nikon 800e

*

I've updated the masthead to better reflect the times and punted on a fresh Artist's Statement. Rehab of the Resource List and Bibliography remains ongoing.

Travel Resources for the Superior Basin along with links to websites, webcams, blogs and other such that feature news & views from around the region are added and will be updated as needed. Those're for infotainment purposes only, no other endorsement implied. There's also a short list with links to blogs by writer friends of mine.

I'll do my best to keep my little slice of ether better occupied than it's lately been. Times change and so must we, to survive them. The plan is to work on fewer things in order to work better on those I do best. We'll see how that goes.

The generosity of spirit gifted me by those I've met through this project goes a long way to sustaining both it and me. Thank-you for being here.

Solarius

Fayette MI, 2003

4x5 transparency film