Waiting on prairie autumn…

 

…to fall.

For this year's golden season to finally be

something other than just more stubborn summer

steadily degrading.

Thankfully a bit cooler, this past summer ran hot. Damned hot.

In any event distinctly softer

with longer light

and less of it,

given autumn’s inexorably shorter, increasingly reflective days.

They say that from today going forward the season will at last revert to normal for the duration.

That's the official word, at least.

Except since normal’s rendered utterly relative these days,

I wonder how we’ll ever know.

Superior Autumn, unretouched

Starting quite young and continuing for fifteen straight years thereafter, deep autumn tent camping in Superior’s southern wilderness was my annual peak season.

The time every year when I explicitly challenged myself against a wild and sometimes frighteningly fast turning world.

Most years, that adventure was fully engaged exactly now.

Like the week one September it never got above 45° F, rained for five straight days and on the sixth day, it snowed. Four inches.

By & large, my companions and I had a blast. And on occasion we didn’t much, we learned stuff.

Things that’d go on to enrich, empower and sustain us the rest of our lives.

Because each and every year we returned to edge season wilderness driven by evolving purpose. Through that, we were gifted lessons in perennial perseverance.

Of my two stalwart fellow travelers I’d the good fortune to marry Heather reasonably young, while Johnny’s recently dead.

Such is life.

In the good old days, when winter’s hard edge typically first arrived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula wilderness, we were there to brave it.

On the calendar then, that'd be just about now.

These days, prime time autumn viewing along Superior’s southern shore is preempted until conditions are met, likely nearer the middle of October. That was all but genuine winter, back when.

Time sure friggin’ flies under our unyielding whip, eh?

Just the same, I think being able to justly say long time gone now is an unadulterated good thing.

Turns out this is my 300^th post.

That wasn’t at all the original plan.

Yet, here we still are.

And more of us, besides.

Turns out life can sprout from the hardest rock. Flowers, even.

I’ve got proof.

Imagine that.

Anyway, It's always darkest just before dawn.

At least folk used to say.

Early Autumn Walkabout

Primarily, oak forest.

Basically, old growth.

In any event, mature.

I’d never walked it before. And golden autumn's on the way.

Yee ha.

Shining Light on the Prairie – Summer ‘25

 

It’s not the heat, they say. It’s the humidity.

That’s a tough call when it’s 95°F in the shade and the air’s sopping wet.

For weeks on end, no less.

Not even counting the drought, which multiyear trend continues apace.

How blistering hot air can retain so much moisture for so long without leaking, I don’t know.

Never did much summer landscape work with the Linhof. By & large, that eye found only obscurity in all the green.

This isn't then.

Given the extreme weather, active life tended to lay low this summer.

Often just peeking out from the shade.

By & large, the usual suspects mostly feasted early and late.

That’s the thing about prairie and oak savanna remnants.

The landscape abides through the abundance of life it hosts. That’s how it’s made and perennially remade.

Near summer’s end came intermittent deluges.

In short dramatic bursts over a couple weeks, the air finally wrung itself out.

With that, whole scads of babies followed.

Including this American Dagger moth caterpillar bustling around a tree. Fully two inches long and utterly unperturbed by me.

Whose fuzzy beauty is @ least mildly toxic to the touch. Irritating as all hell, some say.

Which I suppose explains the haughty yellow Hey look at me coat.

Then the first taste of autumn swept in from the north, bringing welcome relief.

Not a moment too soon, I say.

Because now we're all out poking around.

Even as autumn’s first cutting edge is already come to eat.