Shining Light on the Prairie -- The Last Day of Summer, 2018

Yeah, I know. The old gods tell us the lush green season's got three whole weeks and a bit yet to go. It's marked on their calendar. Yea, summer.

Nonetheless, we'll diverge here on the trail from Nahma and Fayette leading to Grand Marais and the Kingston Plains for to pay real time respects to this day. Meteorologically speaking, on the stroke of midnight tonight summer is officially over.

That's as in finito. Kaput. See y'all next year.

At our latitude, August drains from the prairie some seventy-seven minutes of daylight like drought leaching water from seasonal wetlands. Appropriately, our little patch of prairie shows signs of wear and tear. The prairie's not stupid.

Neither are its many denizens, who know full well that as daylight recedes, so too does opportunity. For some weeks now, in all languages the cry's gone out: Everyone eats!

Okay, not that guy. At least, not that day.

The young Cooper's Hawk came to feast on sparrows. At Death's dark shadow cast across the hot white sky, a raucous alarm was raised. The sparrows took refuge in a bush too thick for hawks to penetrate. From safe haven they hurled insult in their loudest sparrow voices at the would be sparrow eater. That day, this hawk just stewed in the heat while sparrows swore.

It's been a productive season for great wasps, both Black and Golden. Especially Black, they've been prolific. In numbers I've not previously seen, Great Black Wasps swarm fast-fading oregano. Since these awesome flying beasts are non-aggressive, I stand close among them beneath the still searing sun and watch as they have at it.

Lately, that stand of hardy blossums is turned more competitive.

Last week a female Great Black Wasp knocked a pair of conjoined Monarchs right off the oregano, where they'd peaceably settled to do their essential late season mating thing. That giant wasp chased those Monarchs a good thirty feet up in the air and maybe another thirty southwards, before peeling off and returning to the oregano. I'd never seen the like.

The Monarchs settled on a broad sunflower leaf and presumably finished their business.

Though the hereditary monarchy's in trouble, at our place it's also been a fine year for Monarchs. We grow milkweed to call those in and it does the rest.

Once the bloom's off the milkweed, other flowering plants provide fuel for the Monarch's multigenerational trip south. Most days this time of year, we get multiple travelers passing through. This morning I counted four. Some stick around a few days, as at a way station.

Monarchs can be surprisingly aggressive. Occasionally, they'll chase sparrows for no good reason I know. The sparrows run from the butterfly. It's a hoot. Monarchs don't seem to well tolerate Swallowtails, either. There've been a bunch of those this year too. Starting with the Hurricane River in May, it was almost as if they'd followed me home.

Down here, we get both Black and Eastern Tiger.

We've a hummingbird that visits the ­­honeysuckle probably twice a day, early and late. We're on the regular route of at least three different varieties of hummingbird moths. Those are reticent critters and tough to adequately capture. Not to mention the moths most often visit after dark.

By contrast, skippers favor the sun and are unabashed posers.

Some years, skippers emerge by the score. Upon approach they scatter in flicking clouds before me. Not this summer.

Still, we've hosted a few. And with skippers comes variety.

When I transitioned from large format film to digital capture I desired something new to do. A fresh effort. One that took full advantage of my spiffy new toolset.

Playing to the Nikon's core strengths, over the last few summers I've taught myself to see small. Today's my bug shooter coming out party.

Bees of all sorts are in trouble worldwide, for a complexity of reasons. I understand no abundance or variety of those on our little patch will affect change great enough to alter the pollinators' collective path. That's an abiding sadness.

Yet all summer long -- day in and day out, rain or shine -- looking at life in the macro and finding it so robust proved a joy. All most any creature ever requires is the right invitation, then the party's on. With the months of June, July and August came profusion under harsh light, unabated.

From that brutal light, bits of welcome shade offered refuge. Provided you knew where to find it and could fit. Otherwise, it's damned sweaty work.

Today's light is significantly softened. Shadows fall easy on the prairie, muted harbingers of short times just over the horizon. Some of the the sunflowers might hold till near frost. Even now, attention turns increasingly toward those. This little bugger wouldn't have bothered with a sunflower, even a couple weeks ago. He needn't have. Now, he must.

Cicadas no longer wait on evening for vespers. They take up the chorus upon morning then continue loudly on and off throughout. Night is owned by crickets, katydids and other mostly tiny, sometimes winged things generally unseen, but whose summer song is much appreciated. It's a time of furtive hummingbird moths.

On warm nights especially, there is a symphony. With the dew, a kingdom of spiders stands revealed. Then it all begins again, if not quite anew. And sometimes, in the dark of night things turn.

Autumn brings the harvest. After that, the hard season. Old gods, new gods or no gods at all, that is the law.

Lucky for me Painted Ladies don't covet strawberries. Heather and I like to think of those as ours.

Feast while you still can, the prairie says. Time's a-wastin', it says.

And so we do.

The Iron Giant -- Fayette, MI

As I worked the Linhof during my first visit to Fayette, a man approached. About my own age, he'd enthusiasm to spare and an obvious desire to share.

"I saw you carrying that camera down the hill," he said. "It looked like your hair was on fire."

By way of explanation I waved one arm wide, as if that might take everything in and also excuse the metaphorically flaming hair. He seemed to understand. Two strangers by prior inclination tossed together on a strange land. Few words passed between us. Few were needed because there we stood.

Fayette Historic Park isn't curated architectural aggregate like Old World Wisconsin. It's no reconstruction of a legendary past as at Old Fort William, which though admirable is today neither where it once was nor old.

Unlike Fayette, Nonesuch comes shrouded in wildness that eats it. Though by no means impenetrable, Nonesuch is mostly incomprehensible and always will be. What stands at Fayette stands plain.

Victoria's character is down-home gritty. At Victoria on any given autumn afternoon, as long light fails behind the ridge and a lone docent fires up an aged smoker to chase the chill, with a shiver you might yet catch an authentic hint of a real past. Pumpkins and corn stalks optional.

In 1951 abandoned Fayette was cast in administrative amber. That's when the Escanaba Paper Company swapped it to the State of Michigan for publicly owned timberland.

Fayette Historic Park  was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. The currently crumbling icon of Nahma is on that list too.

This is a ghost town shorn of ghosts. Under bright light it shines cold. Maybe because the only living thing that ever really mattered here was the fire, which is long gone. You wouldn't invite that back, even if you could.

Fayette first came online in 1867 along the eastern shore of Big Bay De Noc at Snail Shell Harbor, to take advantage of nearby Escanaba's then bustling commercial docks.

At Fayette the Jackson Iron Company built roaring charcoal kilns and blast furnaces fueled by local hardwood and limestone. The Company used those to transform their cut of the Iron Giant into more profitable pig iron.

A monument to this fiery enterprise remains, as at the burial site of a barbarian King.

Structures were built primarily of wood. Except the walls of the Company's last company store are lime mortar and brick.

Fayette's population likely peaked somewhere short of 500 people. Mostly, these were immigrant folk. Workers got paid monthly. In gold, they say. That's some Nice work if you can get it, as they say. Residential areas of the town were laid out strictly according to caste. In Fayette, you knew where you stood. There was a railroad.

A race track and baseball field were up the hill behind and above the furnaces. Woe be to you when you placed a bet on a horse or played a little ball while Fayette belched into a full fetch breeze off the lake. There was nowhere to go for the smoke and stench and flying bits of hellfire, save to follow you up and over the hill on your one day off.

Taverns and brothels were located beyond the playing fields. It's said the citizens of Fayette once torched a brothel as a penalty for sexual slavery.

The town boasted a theater. That's still on the second floor of the original wooden structure, accessible only via a single enclosed stairway. On a wall of the theater, preserved behind Plexiglas, you can read the signatures of traveling performers who once played there. It's a nice touch.

Yet each and every time I mount those narrow wooden stairs I recall Calumet's later Italian Hall disaster. What were any of these people thinking?

Did they just not believe they'd burn? How could that be? Especially at Fayette, considering why they were there. Bet no docent fires up that stage right smoker, these days.

In May of 1883 the furnaces were feared destroyed by the fire they were constructed to contain. How that can happen, I don't know. The Jackson Iron Company made repairs and in September production resumed. The charcoal iron market was by then in decline and market forces soon did to Fayette what fire couldn't, quite.

Midway through 1885, operations at the kilns and furnaces became intermittent. By 1891 they were done. Once set, industrial fire burned hot at Fayette, then was struck. The flame lasted twenty-four years.

The town changed hands. For a while, it was a resort. That too, failed.

These days, the trail down the peninsula toward Fayette Historic Park cuts through farm fields studded with towering wind turbines that look like massive inverted grasshoppers, broken legs spinning in the wind.

This enterprise is named The Heritage Garden Wind Farm. It's quite the undertaking. Likely, the garden's creators take actuarial certitude as in their long term favor. Over a broad stretch of land, they've claimed the horizon and much of the sky.

Critical elements of endeavor melded to time and place don't well translate. Not to words. Not to images. Not to administrative preserves. Nonetheless, at Fayette we've chosen perpetual maintenance, hoping the future will take a lesson and render better, more lasting product from history's raw makings than a postindustrial cemetery, where today rest the bones of an Iron Giant.

*

As of this writing, should you head north across that wild water you'll still soon enough spy the leaning sawdust burner of Nahma, near the mouth of the Sturgeon River with no sturgeon. The burner was built circa 1888-1893, after wooden Nahma burnt one time too many.

Enterprise at Nahma and Fayette didn't coincide but briefly. The former was being born with the latter on its deathbed. Under any circumstance, one couldn't readily see the other, for the white limestone cliffs protecting Snail Shell Harbor.

I like to think one summer night two lovers made their way up those cliffs above failing Fayette, to forget their troubles and focus only on the moment. Then the deep red glow of newborn Nahma burning caught their eye. There'd have been just enough overlap between the two enterprises for someone to have seen that, from high enough ground during a sufficiently dark night.

In any event, at the administered ghost town that is Fayette, no spark left by any flame once called upon to build a modern world exists. What remains there is abstract reflection.