Yeah, an autumn count isn't regular. But these aren't regular times and
now is ripe for an assessment of the forest even despite all the trees...
Iron County WI, 2015
It was September 29th, 2011 when on the Gogebic Range autumn took a hard turn just as I embarked upon
this Odyssey. Because I'd once and forever soon run out of film and the
intention was to spend it well, it figured that the narrative arc of the project
would inevitably possess a beginning, middle and at some point no matter the
potential for abrupt untidiness, an end. A year, I figured.
The film lasted fourteen months and with work yet undone, I'd figured
wrong. Funny, how narratives take on lives of their own.
Then (if my always suspect math is correct), after 117 separate entries
made over the span of 36 months, in September 2014 I took my first month off
from delivering to you those goods I'd harvested. Not bad, considering the recalcitrant
and obscure nature of the field.
This year on the prairie, autumn turned the morning of September 28th, a
few days after I'd returned from Superior.
One could almost smell the big lake on the wind that flowed down hard from
the north where the growing season'd ended the day before. Just the same, even
now in my yard goldfinches fatten on sweet basil, catnip and the spiky
skeletons of Black-eyed Susans. But the sunflowers we grow for them are about
gone now and that means soon, the goldfinches will be as well.
Our newest baby girl, August 2015
Fresh to the autumn prairie are a few scattered Crows and Blue Jays,
too. I hear those more than see them. Though the prairie's an important part of
their ancestral home, these days the family Corvidae are loathe to live there
and have become merely edge season transients passing through on their way to
somewhere more hospitable. Crows (in particular) are smart. Having suffered a holocaust within generational
memory, who can blame them when they avoid the place like the plague?
On the
Gogebic Range, Crows and their cousin Ravens are so black, they shine beneath
the bright autumn sun in clusters of hammered silver.
Any day now Sandhills will be on their flyover in squawking skeins that
draw me to the yard no matter the weather. Maybe this'll be the year that I
capture video of those on the wing while they purposefully avoid airplanes and
mutual catastrophe in a crowded flight pattern.
There's also the fact that while I was on the Range a few weeks ago,
the smarmy schmuck who once tried to cheaply peddle the very last resources of the Gogebic to his
carpetbagger crony from Florida realised he wasn't Presidential material after
all. The People spoke and Scott Walker slunk away to lick his wounds. That's
gotta count for something, right?
Lastly -- at least god willing & the creek don't rise -- before this
month is out I'll turn sixty.
Keweenaw County, 2015
That should happen just about the time oak savannahs reach their peak autumnal
glory, smallmouth lose a scosche of caution prior to the rivers freezing and the first snow falls upon the wilds
of the Superior basin, provided winter hasn't jumped the gun before then. There'll
be Slate-Colored Dark-eyed Juncos in the yard, stopped by on their way south
maybe even from the woods around Dan's Cabin, to pick over what no longer sustains goldfinches.
*
Along the Penokee Hills, 2011
I've been dissatisfied with the public state of this project for quite
the while now. The narrative was intended to be on point, substantive and maybe
even occasionally entertaining. For a good while, it was pretty much all of
that. But once the film was exhausted, the road trip framing device couldn't
sustain the narrative because the story itself was changed.
And yet still with work left
undone.
Among other things, it's to my shame that I didn't feature the Lake Superior Bi-National Forum before it got defunded. And I've not yet managed to wrap my brain around the
conundrum that is the late, ever great John Voelker.
Lucky for me no one'll be defunding him, eh?
So starting with 2016, I'll make this a quarterly offering in the hope
I can then return it to something more reliably rich and without also having to
sacrifice my broader creative interests and/or opportunities, which are about
as robust as they've ever been.
Thanks for being here, it's still chuggin' along only because you are. So
please don't go wandering off too far, there's more to come.
In the meantime, by all means get out to revel in the wonders of autumn
while there's still time to do it, as winter's just over the horizon and time's
a wasting...
Ottawa National Forest, 2011
