At the end
of September I told of the afternoon when winter rudely intruded upon autumn to
provide a stark reminder of seasons turning. After that the region enjoyed an
extended period of unusually mild and stable weather, which lasted into
November. Then six weeks to the day of autumn having first taken a hard turn, winter kicked the door in.
Just
prior, long light streamed through late season woods stripped bare.
Through most
of the year the great northern wilderness is an obscurity. Thick understory
built up around uncountable trees arrayed beneath a nearly impenetrable canopy of
green makes the forest appear as a
single entity when in fact it’s nothing of the sort. Instead, the northwoods is
a massive chorus of rough and tumble harmony, individual voices raised together
with life and death freely intermingled, for three consecutive seasons the former feeding
on the latter in a riot of opportunistic appetite.
With the
last of autumn that chorus grows ever more unbalanced as trees shed leaves, brisk winds strip the place of its veil and all things weak or dying fall finally to the ground in a clutter. The occasional dilapidated building, groups of browsing
deer, long abandoned cars, cranky red squirrels, hard rock outcroppings,
pileated woodpeckers and old gnarled trees -- all stand revealed as
distinguishable from the whole.
If anything, the chorus then becomes richer for
its transparency.
The evening
before winter arrived, I attended a public hearing at Gogebic Community College. Held by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to publicly discuss Orvana’s proposed
Copperwood mine, you’d think a meeting like that might’ve included at least a
question or two about the environmental impact of a mine, but you’d be wrong.
It was pep rally pure and simple, no bones about it and get
those questions the Hell out of the way already.
Scheduled for
three hours it lasted 80 minutes, if that. No apologies offered, none
necessary. What do we need? We need jobs. When do we need them? We need them now!
The toy
Canon sat at rest on my lap and I might have brought you some of the
cheerleading but as the evening progressed too rapidly from a litany delivered by region-wide officialdom (attendance apparently mandatory) to a succession of everyday
citizens, absurdity blurred to tragicomedy to outright tragedy and these
good citizens deserve to stand for their hard choice outside the idle gaze and snap judgments of
Internet gawkers. I wish I’d the chops of a Samuel Beckett in order to bring it
to you distilled to its essence and yet unchewed, but my poor best will have to serve.
Old men,
most wistful some still fierce, leaned heavily upon nostalgia for better days.
Businessmen, desperate to stay in business even if only for another few years. Educators, burdened by damage
done to youth through unrelieved rural poverty, with the field of opportunity gone
barren. “We want our kids to stay here” played a common refrain.
At the last there rose an American mother, stoic but barely dry eyed while offering a song of
Depression. She lamented that not only is the region depressed, we are depressed, with heads low and shoulders stooped, weighted down by
cruel fate and crueler history, crueler because men make history and are
crueler than fate. She sang that the Copperwood mine could serve as a new
beginning, a wellspring of revitalization, a turning of our dark season to a brighter
tomorrow for our children, our culture and community -- together in a
great and magnificent land for generations to call home.
Copperwood
is slated to last 14 years. Which means that when it closes, children conceived during
this first flush season of desperate hope will be looking to their final years
at A.D. Johnston H.S. and the elimination of those jobs, precisely
when they’ll most need local prospects in order to remain in the region.
Everything
else aside, that’s the thing about mining: whether copper or iron, they ain’t
making any more. Once the resource is tapped, transformed into a marketable
commodity and sold off to China to be repurchased by us in some other form, our resource is just gone. Then everything
dependent upon it goes away and quickly too, a few short years of cash in hand being
insufficient to pin an entire future on and there’s ample proof of that
already, everywhere around Superior.
Overnight,
winter came.
The forest
is a wonder, flush with the first snow of the season. The chorus falls to a
hush so low you can hear the snow fall. Superior is great enough that it makes
its own weather and bands of lake effect snow flew across the Range, a little
here a whole bunch there. As it happened, I headed off into the whole bunch.
It was work in a splendid place and isn’t that everything the good citizens of the
region ask for, after all? Shooting made nettlesome by squalls, I started by spending as
much time watching a shy flock of what I took for American Coots that’d
taken refuge on a backwoods lake as I did actually working.
After a few
hours it was prudent to head towards safer haven rather than farther away. Eight
inches down and mine the only recent track on forest service roads wasn't simply an enticing gift, it was an invitation for the wilderness to demonstrate once again its
indifference to every human concern.
Along the
hilly ribbon of glorified two-lane that allows a corridor of wind to slice through the
forest between Marenisco and Wakefield, I drove briefly in near whiteout. Only
a few other working folk shared the road, because work is what we do and where
it takes us we must go.
Meanwhile,
hard rock was covered in soft white, while the deer and Coots and red squirrels
and even the millions of trees played. Unburdened by human concern they murmured on, knowing that short of dying there’s
nothing can be done but to remain resolute in the face of a long winter in the wilderness, with its sure hard
times and roiled discontent.
That and - provided
we mustn’t eat our own bodies for survival in the meantime - to take comfort that a
season having once turned, must inevitably turn back again.
