Show & Tell – A Vintage Photo Album

Photo by H. Hutton

Autumn 1975, Heather & I took our first trip together to the Superior wilderness. Earlier that summer she'd returned from Europe with a 35mm Topcon camera. In the Ottawa national Forest that fall, I snatched it.

Below are my 1^st ever images of architectural/cultural abandonment, taken in 1975 as Heather and I wandered around the forest. The Ottawa's boundaries might be legally distinct, but on the ground they're richly unknowable.

Turns out, the specific interests that later informed my life's photographic work were in play at the start.

Who knew?  Not me. I'd forgotten.

Until determining, even prior to pestilence, that purging and scanning what'd then be left from my once vast catalog of vintage 35mm film was an essential task, way overdue. I mean if you're never gonna use it and don't really care about it, why the hell is stuff still hanging around?

The savage culling was unexpectedly easy, the scanning went as expected and the process of discovery proved occasionally joyous. Now it's done.

I'm almost completely indifferent to family snapshots and probably, our vacation pictures aren't exactly standard issue. Except I've always been exceptionally keen on Heather and sometimes the feeling's mutual, so there's that.

Forty-five years ago, I appropriated Heather's camera in order "to keep my hand in." That's what I said, even to myself.

Already shooting 16mm film with my trusty Bolex, the pedestrian tourist camera with the crappy glass felt like creative surrender. I was ashamed.

Technology being what it is, in hindsight the excuse seems silly. My youthful filmmaking dreams were about to get mortally wounded, when video tape killed the 16mm film industry.

Soon after that, I bought an equally trusty Nikon F, returned the Topcon to Heather and never much looked back. Winter 2020, my digital archive of vintage 35mm film has returned that antique medium to existential value.

For instance, this sore neglected catalog reminds me that sometimes, Lake of the Clouds actually is…

And of the time I raced an electrical storm up that same overlook so to shoot the beast as it roared through the valley and broke upon the precipice, about the highest ground anywhere around. Since we arrived more or less together, all I came away with is this:

A massive fail, considering. On the other hand, I escaped alive. Let's call it a win then, crappy image notwithstanding.

I remember that hauling my sorry ass out in the dark after too little sleep on the first morning in a new place just to see what might be seen can be vastly rewarding. Watching light incrementally throw night off a magnificent world is exactly where one needs to be. The rest of the day can take care of itself.

Our first morning in Copper Harbor:

My dimming perspective on our trek into the roadless McCormick Wilderness is also altered…

…by visual proof that car camping at modest Bobcat Lake just two easy miles in from Marenisco's theoretical civilization could be and frequently was a whole lot tougher than overnighting among the remnants of Cyrus McCormick's camp.

Of course, no man's memory is all peaches and cream.

Now it's fresh in my mind that when wandering off into the woods at what we thought just might be/could be the way to semi-mythical Nonesuch, we'd no earthly clue where we actually were.

Then on a steep hill cloaked in deep wet woods, at the blindingly obscure ruins of a definitely lost civilization, I nicked this souvenir:

Which I've been trying and failing to capture on far better terms nearly every visit since. At this point, 35mm will just have to do.

And it hurts being reminded that Bobcat's byzantine spider kingdom - what I worked at so hard during my final 35mm visit – will just have to wait (hopefully only) another year. Perhaps next spring I'll at last capture and forever hold that wonder in numeric amber. Then I'll not have to try more.

In any event, never let anyone tell you working a gossamer subject that appears and disappears with the light on any soft breeze while you try to keep a canoe steady is easy.

On the brighter side, I've recovered stone cold proof that once when along Superior's northern shore I encountered the incredibly rare Canadian Octopus, red variant. And when I did, it smiled at me.

I've not breathed deep Superior's northwoods wilderness maybe three calendar years of the last forty-five. I didn't consider those good years.

During the Odyssey, I embraced the place better than before and likely, more frequently than ever again. In ways big and small, definable and not, Superior embraced me right back.

What others call vacation, I called opportunity. Through my efforts year after year after year I built both a creative avocation and found the great love affair of my life, 2^nd only to beautiful and effervescent Heather.

It never occurred to me that I'd been making a 'memory book'. As it happens, I was. And it's of inestimable value to me, in part because on the occasion the Presque Isle River hurtling toward Superior is in my mind's eye, the image below is what I see.

Alone among the hundreds of shots I've taken there, this little piece of antique film - blown highlights, murky color tone and indecipherable shadows included - best captures what I feel, when on those slippery rocks. It's like returning home.

I can almost hear the river spirits sing. As ever, they call for me…