It's said that summer in the U.P. is three days around the end of July.
Everything else is either headed into winter or hoping to survive it.
Along the Superior Basin summer is an opportunity too fleeting to
waste. A brief season to sleep easy and be warm. A chance to flourish. Belly up
to the bar, boys. Everybody eats.
This being August, already days grow steadily shorter with the sun daily
dipping ever lower in the sky.
Visually, summer is my least favorite season in the Northwoods. With
riotous growth the whole place goes damnably opaque. And irreducibly, blindingly
green. Now, there's nothing wrong with green in dabs, but as a palette...
This is selected fieldwork from June & July, captured mostly in the
Keweenaw and along the eastern shore of the lake in Ontario during the height
of summer. I've set it to 'Spiegel Im Spiegel", a quietly evocative piece
by the esteemed Estonian composer Arvo Part.
During this Odyssey, whether at the end of hard days spent in the field
or after hundreds of miles driven, Part's deeply introspective choral works
especially help smooth the way towards my own easy sleep -- for four seasons on
the road and now inevitably, inexorably, counting down...
That was lovely,and heart-tugging, thought provoking, and memory providing. Thank you, Frank.
ReplyDeleteNonnie, you're such a dear. Thank-you.
ReplyDeleteI know it isn't exactly what most might expect when they think 'summer', but this brief season that far north carries with it inescapably complex shading...