Monday, March 28, 2016

Jim Harrison, 1937 – 2016


        
 The legal provenance of this image is obscure. Should the owner object, I'll remove it.
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.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

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



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...

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

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.