Northwoods Autumn Festival

My hometown is Bessemer MI.

I’ve never lived there, but my maternal family roots go back 120 years in the place, it was there that as a child I first saw the Northern Lights from the back window of my Uncle John’s house and the Gogebic Range is where I’ve felt most at home. So I claim it with no less authority than were I born there and dare anyone to say I can’t.

Along the way I’ll tell you the story of Bessemer, which is complex. But not today. On the weekend of October 1^st the sun shone bright upon the Range and Pumpkin Fest went off with nary a hitch…though the helicopter guy never showed so the helicopter rides didn’t either.

I suppose Pumpkin Fest is Bessemer’s celebration of both harvest and Halloween, the latter held a month early. That’d be because Monday’s forecast calls for 45°. Folk will be wearing gloves, which means you can’t lick your fingers and that makes it tough to enjoy your snow cones, which (apparently) go all the way back to the Roman stinkin’ Empire.

I read it on the Internet so it must be true.

Among the delights at Pumpkin Fest was a horseshoe tournament held down by the VFW, an antique tractor pull and a pie social. Abelman’s Department Store, where they’ve been selling quality goods since 1887 with attendant service you’ll never find at the Wal-Mart, held a sale. A pumpkin seed spitting contest was met and won. And of course there was food. Taken together, the sort of day many are familiar with only from old movies, if at all. The sort of day our corporate media delivery machine would treat as quaint while obliquely snickering at the rubes. Cynicism being the order of our day, as it helps keep the rubes in line.

When I arrived downtown, ventriloquist Dave Parker and Skippy already held a crowd of costumed children rapt. I first thought to show you pictures of these kid’s faces because they’re a treasure, but the Internet is no small town newspaper and I’ve no business plastering kid’s faces across it so Mr. Dave and Skippy will have to do:

I went over to the pie social at City Hall. Admission was cash on the barrelhead if you intended to eat pie, free to merely socialize. The table of pie stretched 40 feet or more, the auditorium was packed and the place bristled with anticipation. I was just in time to capture this:

I must be allergic to pie because my eyes misted over, so I went back out into the sun to clear them. In the grand American tradition, two members of the local Tea Party had a table set out on the street, taking their personal politics to the public square. Business was scant, beaten to Hell by snow cones.

Though popular movements on both extremes of our political spectrum currently dominate the news, that table served as reminder that our retail politics have shifted from the street to the Internet and social media, where we gnash the dry kernels of our myriad grievances 24/7. We need never face our neighbor in disagreement, need never consider dissenting opinion. That means too many of us now try to remake our community in our own proprietary image, taking little account of our neighbors.

We ought treat this newfound digital liberty with better care, as each of us sitting alone venting our miseries into the ether means we’re free to neglect what it means to be a neighbor.  And regardless of intention, in such isolation we end up working against our community’s greater health.

No matter what you choose to believe, that’s no way to teach those children on that stage how to be either a good neighbor or a good citizen.

Anyway, some days are just to celebrate who we are and at least at Pumpkin Fest, most folk paid politics and its attendant grievance no mind. The autumn sun was brilliant. Kids laughed and skipped and sang. Adults proudly embraced their community, while Dave Parker with his goofy songs and invariably creepy sidekick Skippy held children of all ages in happy thrall.

Though I never did learn why the helicopter guy didn’t show, and me having set ten bucks aside for to purchase a bird’s eye view.

King Copper -- Prelude

Among my favorite drives along Superior's basin is the 24 miles or so of two lane blacktop named South Boundary Road that runs up and down and all around through splendid woods from the Park Headquarters of the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness to the Presque Isle unit on the western edge of the park. It’s what you call “Seasonal”. That is it’s not plowed so in winter you travel it at your own risk. Like every other day I suppose, but more so.

To get there off the Gogebic Range, head out of Wakefield and hook a quick left onto County Road 519 to leave civilization behind. In Thomaston -- which lost its post office in 1926 but was once a happening place -- take a second left and you’re headed straight north into mostly nothing but a waving ocean of trees until the Presque Isle River falls out from the southeast to greet you on the right.

From there north becomes relative and after a bit you meet up with the aforementioned South Boundary Road. Along County 519 lies today’s story.

We’ve dug copper in the region for better than 5,000 years and times being tough, we’ve returned to take some more. A company named Orvana intends to dig a mine between the Black and the Presque Isle River, out in the woods near the shore of Superior. They call it “Copperwood”, designed to sound like a bucolic subdivision but reachable only via County Road 519. Fourteen years the job creators say, they’ll pound copper from hard rock and make the region worth something again. Sell the treasure on the open market so American firms can bid for our copper against the Chinese or whomever. Create jobs. Make some money. Fourteen good years maybe more, to help reinvigorate our community. Win win.

On the last day of September, a group of people got together at the Wakefield Twp. Hall. The mood was celebratory, the way it is when folk gather to slap themselves on the back for a job well done.

Turns out, Orvana will contribute something less than a quarter of the $3.5 million it’ll cost to convert 519 into an industrial service road, which meager percentage was sufficient for all involved to tout the virtues of public/private cooperation, even despite 75% of the tab being left to you and me. Giddy with enthusiasm and as reported by the Ironwood Daily Globe the next day, State Senator Tom Casperson took the opportunity to exclaim:

“Let’s put our people to work and let’s not accept people telling us that we’re ruining the environment. We won’t accept that. Together, they can’t stop us.”

They? Who the Hell is they?

The legacy of mining litters the Superior Basin like fallen leaves in autumn. From ancient copper pits on Isle Royale east to Sault Ste. Marie, which canal was dug so we could haul riches away from the place, northwest from there to the copper, gold and platinum around Marathon Ontario, southwest to the famous Wasabi Iron Range in Minnesota, across to my home turf of the Gogebic Range and finally back to the proposed Copperwood on the western edge of the Keweenaw Fault where famous mines once sprung up atop ancient pits. We’ll not escape the legacy of mining along our scenic drive and will have ample opportunity to decide for ourselves what that’s meant to the region and how it continues to inform the culture.

At any rate, County Road 519 isn’t where we’ll make the case either way, as it’ a done deal.

I just wanted you to know that even before final permits for the mine have been let, work on the road has begun and is scheduled for completion in 2013.

So if you'd prefer to drive Michigan County 519 and see that:

leading to this,

which after a short distance culminates here,

then you’d best take the opportunity sooner rather than later, ‘cause all the way from Wakefield right up to the South Boundary Road, County 519 is about to be crawling with heavy equipment.

King Copper demands no less, in the name of preserving multigenerational despair.

Where Eagles (Almost) Dare

For decades I’ve longed to capture an excellent photo of an eagle on the wing and for decades they’ve evaded me, proving I made the right choice when deciding not to become a wildlife photographer.

These days, eagles are recovered around the Superior Basin to the extent that when coming up over a blind hill on some two-lane road you might surprise one worrying fresh roadkill, so I suppose there's yet a chance.

In the interim, there's this. Captured with the Toy Canon two weeks ago…

The 51st of these United States

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan has long been treated as the suspect cousin with special skills who only gets his seat at the family table for so long as those skills are needed and when they’re not, the invitation gets lost in the mail. But just let some war effort require iron or the price of copper spike, and the mosquitos of outside interests swarm the place like it’s the first warm blood of spring.

When not being exploited for its “inexhaustible” resources, the region is mostly ignored by the State Capital in Lansing. Periodically, some local will launch a campaign for the U.P. (as it’s colloquially known) to secede from the State of Michigan and become the State of Cloverland, a distinctly misleading name for such a rugged state of being.

Yet on maps, the Upper Peninsula looks like no part of Michigan at all, connected only by the Mackinac Bridge. The late John Voelker, a splendid writer and Michigan Supreme Court Justice said “The best thing that could happen to the U.P. would be for someone to bomb the bridge”. Judge Voelker was no one’s fool though if uttered today his thoughts on the Mighty Mac might earn the good judge a visit from the Department of Homeland Security right quick.

Just the same, if the bridge vanished into the Straits of Mackinac, the only thing bordering the U.P that isn’t Lake Superior would be Wisconsin, who had her chance to claim this land but didn’t much want it then and can’t have it now.

Wisconsin shills herself as the Northwoods with supper clubs, family resorts, fishing guides and shops that hawk “genuine” Indian moccasins to tourists, but to cross the Mississippi watershed divide is to leave that noise behind and enter a world apart. Then those roads that in WI lead to resorts become fire lanes and logging roads leading mostly to nowhere but more woods.

A landscape of long shadow, hard rock and forest so deep it’s a national treasure in need of preservation and a towering resource crying out for harvest, depending.

The Northwoods is a tough, glorious place with a checkered past. To look at it today you wouldn’t think that not so long ago damned near every tree in the Upper Peninsula was cut down. Or that cougar and wolves were trapped out. Eagles nearly gone too. Or that the ridges now dressed in autumn’s finest were crowned by dozens of mines belching smoke skyward, while stamp mills pounding stone to separate copper from poor rock shook the earth like giants walking. And the towns that grew to support the industry, towns with names like Iron Belt and Bessemer, these swarmed over with immigrants who brought their own customs, which were made new in a new place. Notably, those included the Finns with their saunas and the Cornish with their pasties and thank goodness for both.

You’d never guess the region was honeycombed by rails that led all the way to places like Chicago. Now the tracks are mostly gone, rails recycled, grades converted to snowmobile trails or let go fallow.

Marquette, the biggest city in the U.P., can only be reached by two-lane. Just last week, Frontier Airlines announced its intention to cease air service to the Gogebic/Iron County Airport as of next March, threatening yet further isolation.

And so it goes.

I was talking to a man and his wife, who live on a splendid spit of land they rightly call their own. He said It’s right there in the deed. I own the land but don’t own the minerals beneath it. Some mining company owns those. They can come and put me off my own land for ‘fair market value’.

A friend told me that’s true of most everyone up here who owns a piece of God’s green earth. Are they squatters on their own land?  Tenant Farmers who don’t farm? Whatever the word or phrase, it’d be particularly American, you betcha.

One thing’s certain: it can’t be “landowner." Not when some company you've never heard of preemptively partnered with government in order to put you off your own land by writ as needs might arise.

And it’s not like the mining company pays these folk’s property taxes either. Which would seem only fair, considering.

I suppose that’s emblematic of the central dilemma we’ll explore together over the next year, when we’re not otherwise telling tall tales and having fun in the woods.

These folk who live in splendid isolation, who sustenance hunt and fish, burn wood and propane for heat, who invariably wave to you after you’ve given them wide berth with your car as they walk the gravel shoulder of two-lane blacktop, these people have always just wanted to be taken by the rest of us for what they honestly are. They’ve long since earned that respect and deserve no less, for past services rendered.

Instead, they just keep being taken. By outsiders who don’t live here permanent and never could.

Along the Underwood Grade, Gogebic County, MI