Thin Ice

The last few years, our local prairie landscape's suffered what's called a snow drought. No fan of snow, the phrase feels distinctly counterintuitive to me.

Except I also know that all through the season - especially come spring when winter's dark rule crashes down - snowmelt is life.

And you can't beat snow for a classic winter scene, either. Generally, it's what makes working in the stinkin' cold worth it. Sometimes, you hardly even have to leave the car…

Earlier this month, after a good run of unusually warm weather that included a welcome stiff rain, the temperature was predicted to plunge overnight. The next morning, I walked out searching for signs of the fast freeze.

I'd hoped all that rain made my local prairie ditch run swift and deep. Then perhaps in the night a lattice of fresh ice was thrown over all the resolute brown, making work in the cold worth it.

The day after our national election and its outcome still in doubt, I went looking for late autumn splendor. Mostly I found prairie fire, which in hindsight seemed incredibly apt.

On my last working day of the year, amidst the pandemic I went looking for crystalline beauty and found only thin ice.

Right now, it's snowing. First of the season.

Tomorrow calls for cold driving rain. So 2020 ends with the landscape resolutely abstract and obscure.

Here's to 2021 and us keeping afloat through what'll undoubtedly be a long dark season.

Or at least until some sense of uplift and clarity returns to the now mostly confused and colorless landscape.

Prairie Fire

The abundance of metaphors just begging for use makes choosing one (or two or three or five) confounding. Like trying to capture fire with my fingers.

Pandemic autumn. Made your brain hurt too, right?

I've witnessed two separate & distinct peak autumn seasons most every year of my adult life. It's been a blessing and a privilege.

The first always came during late September/early October on Superior's northwoods. From those, I drew perennial vision and strength.

A month or so later, fall chased south and caught up with me on the prairie. That gave the boot to mystic reverie by reminding me what time it was.

This year I skipped the northwoods pilgrimage and weeks of miserable foul weather ate peak autumn down here. Stinkin' 2020.

Then in November just when you thought it wouldn't, "Indian Summer" arrived. That's a nettlesome term of longstanding cultural currency, not all of it strictly appalling.

As opposed to Injun Summer, which you don't much hear anymore.

On the prairie of my childhood, that's what folk called the typical late autumn warm spell just before winter set in. Despite the multigenerational myth pimping, looking for vanished Indians dancing on the smoke of burning leaves never made any sense to me.

Even as a kid, Where there's smoke there's fire seemed more relevant.

I've heard it said that at autumn's end, with life stripped bare and its bones not yet buried beneath snow, the interdependent world becomes transparent. That for brief times and in the right places, one might catch the whole of things at a glance.

Occasionally what people say is even true. Kind of.

Except the whole world revealed doesn't of necessity bring further clarity to either life's sum or its parts.

Often, it just tells us what we already know.

Or simply confounds.

This year I didn't breathe clean Superior air during any season, not once. Reliably, Indian Summer came to the prairie. Once again, no dead Indians danced in any smoke that I saw.

Gifted a last minute opportunity, I searched late season fields for idols cast of light not gone completely cold. Even found a few.

We now know the prairie's continued existence depends on periodic fire. It burns out the old, converts death to energy and that feeds the new. On the savannah, fire births mighty oaks from little acorns.

Apparent abundance once blinded us to the essential role of fire. Not so much anymore.

I already knew what time it is. The ever-evolving quality of light kept me informed. Winter's not coming, it's here.

But time spent roaming afield where Indians once lived reassured me the real world progresses more or less apace. The burning autumn prairie confirms the circle of life remains unbroken.

The other evening, in cold clear air and fast fading light, sandhill cranes flew south into the night. It's late enough I doubted they'd come this year, so that was good to see. When next they visit, it'll be on the wings of spring.

Availability of apt metaphors notwithstanding.

Forward, through winter. Stay safe, be well.

Vanishing Point

Under constraint of pandemic, I've not left the prairie. The accustomed supply of fresh visual content found evergreen along Superior's basin is, after a good run, unavailable to me.

Supply chain's broken. Repair status pending. No fault of mine, at least.

Things are what they are, right? Damned 2020.

Previously, I'd figured to at least complete my long term work at Whitecap Mountain Manor. I'm reasonably sure that by now this crop circle stain on resurgent life is vanished beneath nameless meadow…

Looks small, right? An insignificant disturbance of unknown origin.

Except Whitecap Mountain Manor once burst from that space. Take my word for it that when the thing was prouder, it stood much bigger than this and far grander on any scale:

My favorite old, abandoned cars are finally gone.

Hard to believe they lasted long as they did, considering the theoretical dollar value put on such things in some circles. The secret treasure hidden just beyond the wooden curtain behind that rusting rocket ship was this:

Cultural artifacts come, they go. Still, it's harder to imagine the mighty ore dock at Ashland as forever vanished from the earth.

That's like someone up and stole a pyramid.

Ancient Egyptians built memorials of stone to cast themselves as eternal gods. Western Civilization's lasting mark on the real world is considerably more god-like than theirs, if far darker.

Short-sighted, we've said Well nothing lasts forever and pushed past. Thus it'll be the Anthropocene Epoch marks our species (ancient Egyptians included) down for all time and that's that.

Some self-evident truths are said to be eternal but in practice prove both remarkably flexible and fragile at the same time, so who can tell? If indeed those truths are everlasting, that'd be way better than any great edifice to the living or the dead, and it might even get us deeper into our namesake epoch than we will under our own failing steam.

This notion of collective individuality gifted us by a bunch of Madeira swilling big thinkers came with a serious caveat. Converting the raw resource of manifest truth into sustainable fact requires better dexterity than humans have demonstrated to date.

When exposed to structural sociopolitical failure and multigenerational despair refashioned as art for their edification and amusement, viewers often search out narrative content that may or may not be there, but at any rate is unknowable to them.

Look at all that stuff. It's like they up and left...

How do people disappear?

Why didn't somebody save it?

The time to save history is before the vanishing point is on it. The boom & bust experiment is done to death. Privilege in any sense of the word won't preserve anyone.

We are, now and again, as one with the Earth. It's not just more art.

21st Century Rules

Near the end of the last millennium, upon getting to the bottom of the precipitous stairs and before setting foot on the bridge suspended over the Presque Isle River, I paused and surveyed the scene below. Folk's attention was drawn to the riverbed. Of course, that drew mine.

It's a magnificent place, well beyond the methods and means of humans to translate. Death's there too, make no mistake.

Below, two men crouched on a slate shelf hard to the swirling current, about opposite where the much missed Dick from Wakefield fished. One man was older and the other younger, though even he was older than me.

Together, the men offered sacred ceremony. They made no effort to hide their love.

Roughly put, Presque Isle means almost island. The bridge over the river and the almost island beyond fairly bustled with tourists that day. Some of them stopped to gawk. A mean sliver of those chose to mock the Indians for being Indians at a place that nurtured them first.

They're called Native Americans for a reason. The few mouthy tourists made no effort to hide their disdain.

I took a position on a high rock and sat very still. I love my river. Anyone come to respect it in any way shape or form's all right by me. Neither had I ever seen such a thing as those two men on any river, making me just another tourist that day.

Later I learned the older man was a shaman and the younger his traveling companion. They'd made the long trip from Canada to honor the river of the old man's ancestors. As it happened, they invited me to walk the trail with them, down to the big lake.

In the woods they spoke, I listened. They observed. I realized how piss poor my vision is. At the lakeshore, we went separate ways with well wishes all around.

At a placid pool that's occasionally a raging river but almost always isn't (thus Presque Isle), using a fallen branch I saved a white dragonfly from drowning. I set it on a safe, warm place to dry.

Headed back to the bridge, I again crossed paths with the two men. I asked the elder if he thought I'd been wrong, to intercede with death on behalf of the swamped dragonfly.

Should I have just let nature take its course?

Not counting certain tourists, no one wants to be seen as arrogant in front of an Ojibwa shaman.

Humans have done such terrible damage to life, we now must do everything we can to help it, the shaman answered. Or words to that effect.

"Old rules no longer apply," he said. As long ago as the 2nd millennium, a wise old man said that to me.

For sure, I knew it was true before he said it. That's why I lifted the dragonfly from impending death, after all. But considering the source, it felt good to be let off the hook just the same.

 

During the high dry heat this past August, I came across a cicada on my sidewalk. It stood motionless in the afternoon sun.

That was just a few feet away from where a couple weeks prior, an adolescent robin landed when it fell dying from the sky. I stood over the bird. It breathed. I hurriedly returned carrying a box lined with a soft towel for creature comfort.

By then the young robin was dead. It felt like she didn't want me to see her die.

I watched the cicada on the sidewalk for a while and decided things just didn't look right with it. Usually when you pick up a cicada, the fierce grip they take on your finger reminds you they spend most of their active lives clinging to tree bark, through all sorts of weather. They're tough little buggers.

This cicada managed an abrupt squawk. Then it rolled over onto its back in the palm of my hand and lay still.

Around here, sparrows gorge on cicadas. Typically, the cicada screams bloody murder until the sparrow picks it down to the hard bits that can't scream. I determined not leave this one laid out in the sun on my hot concrete for some passing Velociraptor to claim.

After I set the cicada in one of our garden boxes where I thought the birds wouldn't easily spot it, I periodically kept an eye on the thing for an hour or so. It moved, a little. Just so much that I knew it still lived.

Then I looked out again and it was gone. If a sparrow found and claimed him, so be it. If the cicada flew away and later that evening sang more cicada song, so much the better.

The inescapably dead robin lies a safe distance into the earth beneath our garden. Above it, a transplanted sprig of Lamb's Ear has already taken. Next year that should sprout a profusion of tiny purple flowers, upon which hungry bees will feast.

The late great teacher and poet Patrick O'Neill wrote, "Death is life."

He was right, of course. Yet as pithy and wonderful and absolutely true though that line is, it's merely half the equation. And the utterly predictable half, at that.

Being human, the metaphysical must be given at least equal weight. Or we aren't what we pretend to be, we never were, there is no god and there never was.

Hell of a choice, right? But if we can't think our way through it using the gifts we've been blessed with, we're no damned good to anyone.

Collectively, we must again learn to treat life – all life – with surpassingly intuitive respect. Then we'll no longer be trapped into parsing the theoretical value of individual existence just so to justify killing it on the altar of some supposed common good.

It's okay to be a predator. Stupid predators don't last long.

"The old rules no longer apply."

In fact, here in the 21^st Century they're demonstrably false and our hewing to them is aggressively ignorant. Terminally arrogant, even.

Truth is, it's new rules from here on and for the duration, whether you like it or not. Two millennia of old world order and it's host of prior restrictions need no longer apply. And science or the news or politicians or your social media feed needn't prove it to anyone's satisfaction, either. There is but to look.

In the end, it won't make a spit of difference if you greet death with equanimity or not. But embrace life while still a sentient part of it, then you stand to make all the difference in the world.

We can help fuel life by individually working every day in ways large and small for its collective future, or lie down and be fuel.

It's your choice. Whichever, there's no third way.

All life matters. Welcome to the 21^st Century, finally begun in earnest...

Shining Light on the Prairie - Summer's End

Summer's officially over, the weatherman says so.

While it's true we might hang our hats on celestial events yet in the offing, this year above all years I'm going with science. And though on general principles I never wish time away, the faster we push through the dark season, the sooner we'll know where we're at and who we'll be on the other side.

Claire Hintz up at Elsewhere Farms recently posted that this year she harvested her pears two weeks earlier than last. That about reflects the state of things on the prairie, too.

Even had I not spent these last months in relative sequestration watching light change on a daily basis, when the wind sends a rustle through the tallgrass and it crinkles the evening voice of trees, that seals the deal no matter what we might otherwise choose to believe.

Already well into the pandemic, this spring stayed resolutely cold and wet, right until it didn't. People around here like to complain We went straight from winter into summer with no spring between, but they're mistaken.

What they really mean is that spring pretty well sucked. This year more than most, eh?

Middle of May, the world turned hot and in June the sun beat down hard upon the land. By August, the land grew parched. I've been thankful everyday for our drought resistant native plants. As have the myriad butterflies, bees and other critters that as soon as it grew hot, showed up in droves.

Each year after a cold miserable winter leaches well into what we'd like to think of as spring, I fret over the life we host. Then, there it all is. This summer that included not one but two litters of baby rabbits, the first birthed in the same garden box as the Great Black Wasps bring their young to feast.

In 2020 I'll not stand in awe amidst northern wilderness, nor catch Superior on the breeze. Unless I convince myself a stiff north wind carries its distinctive freshwater scent all the hundreds of miles down to the prairie, which I sometimes do.

Instead I've looked for recompense on prairie remnants, oak savannas and the backyard garden. The relationship with my native black dirt's stronger and more intimate now than at any time since I was a kid who once thought it might be a good idea to eat some.

The first thing I noticed when the plaque hit this spring was that the world fell quiet. The next thing I noticed was that nothing changed, really. With each passing day, more life returned to the land. As light climbed higher into the sky, summer unfolded just as it would have, pandemic or no.

Now we've entered meteorological autumn. There's no turning back. There's never any turning back.

A few of the local trees are giving it up already. I suppose they're stressed for lack of rain. Crickets sing in the morning brightness. Cicadas all day, desperate to make hay. Goldfinches tear at the bones of Echinacea. The last honeysuckle blossoms falter. Hummingbirds take jealous advantage even as they do. From sunrise to sunset, bees rake up whatever's left that they can find.

None of these creatures need be told it's high time they adapt to changing conditions. How is it so many of us do?

Autumn's long been my favorite season, from back when as a melancholic teen I wallowed in adolescent despair. As a young adult I embraced Superior and year upon year upon year of camping in the northwoods back when late September was the problematic edge of winter made me a lifer.

Diving deep into the golden season along Superior has always made my winters easier to take. This year consigned to the prairie, it's hard to resist rushing through autumn so to endure the inevitable cold as ever, then maybe finding out come spring that the world's not changed overmuch after all.

As able, I'll continue watching the light change day by day. Sometimes even capturing near perfect moments of that, as it reveals life. Through fair weather and foul, good times, hard times and all seasons between, it seems the thing to do.

Not a bad way to live. Or a bad way to go either, so best get it while we can.

Onward.