Notes From the Field

While considering taking this project public I checked out popular photography blogs, which are full of tips and tricks for capturing better images whether on film or file. And of course there’s a lot of gearhead talk, ‘cause without gear you can’t take a photograph at all.

I realised nothing I’d do would fit the template.

The time honored craft of capturing images on large format film isn’t relevant to most of you. Neither is the gear used to do it. I could tell you how to use my light meter and a stop watch to guesstimate proper exposure for transparency film under moonlight or other such arcana, but that’s knowledge you’ll likely never use. So we’ll treat these notes as waysides along the road, making only periodic stops…

Tip ‘o the day #1:

When shooting from a canoe, make sure you’ve brought two anchors for boat control because the quality of your tripod isn’t worth a damn when what you set it on moves:

The first leg of this odyssey encompassed 16 consecutive working days in the field and traversed nearly 3,000 miles, all but 600 or so on two-lane blacktop and too many of those at or near full dark.

The longest day ran 18 hours, the shortest ten. I wanted to see autumn through from early color to past peak and did. If the mission was to chase perfect light, I sometimes chased too much or anticipated poorly and missed things I ought to have captured. That was partly due to the added distraction of the blog and the ease of shooting with the toy Canon for blog content, which together presented a challenging workflow. I pushed on through, learned on the fly from my mistakes and won’t make the same ones again.

That would be tip ‘o the day #2:

When you’re in the field and a thing doesn’t work as planned, change the plan because the gig is to capture the image. Once I adapted my approach to accommodate the increased workload, things went better.

I exposed 30 sheets of 4x5 (nearly 1/10^th my total supply) and 38 rolls of 120mm transparency. I took chances. Some of those worked and some didn’t, which is what happens when you take chances in the field but you always should, especially if you’re shooting digital as there’s no economic barrier to restrain you. Let it fly and sort it out later. Always press forward with your particular vision, even when that means returning home with fewer usable images rather than more.

Knowing that looking at the world exclusively through a lens tends to obscure why I’m looking, I took a handful of hours off during those sixteen days. Left all the gear back at the motel and went out to enjoy the world. Turned out the most exquisite light encountered during the entire time occurred precisely then.

For instance, I captured this only with the toy Canon. Not only is that unacceptable going forward, it’s downright painful:

So tip ‘o the day #3 is the old Boy Scout motto:

Be prepared. And if you’re not, then be content to suffer the laughter of the photo gods. From here on I haul everything everywhere always, even when on break.

The elusiveness of perfect light notwithstanding, I got what I shot: a ratio of better than 2 to 1 with the large format, something less with the Mamiya because with that I was profligate.

I met good folk, shared stories, enjoyed a surprise visit from an otter, through which conversation he spoke and I listened. And on day two I lucked my way onto special a site I’ve coveted for near to a quarter of a century, securing an invitation to return throughout the coming seasons to document the place in full over the next year.

And of course, I got this blog business off to a proper start. All told a fine and proper beginning for an odyssey.

Our first autumn in the field having been well and truly spent, we’ll move  together into November -- in some locations merely a grey, unwelcome harbinger of bitter times to come but up north the hard face of early winter and no foolin’.

Now the waters run cold, the forest lays bare secrets previously hidden and long shadows enhance the landscape, offering ever more opportunity to capture perfect light.

Northwoods Autumn Festival

My hometown is Bessemer MI.

I’ve never lived there, but my maternal family roots go back 120 years in the place, it was there that as a child I first saw the Northern Lights from the back window of my Uncle John’s house and the Gogebic Range is where I’ve felt most at home. So I claim it with no less authority than were I born there and dare anyone to say I can’t.

Along the way I’ll tell you the story of Bessemer, which is complex. But not today. On the weekend of October 1^st the sun shone bright upon the Range and Pumpkin Fest went off with nary a hitch…though the helicopter guy never showed so the helicopter rides didn’t either.

I suppose Pumpkin Fest is Bessemer’s celebration of both harvest and Halloween, the latter held a month early. That’d be because Monday’s forecast calls for 45°. Folk will be wearing gloves, which means you can’t lick your fingers and that makes it tough to enjoy your snow cones, which (apparently) go all the way back to the Roman stinkin’ Empire.

I read it on the Internet so it must be true.

Among the delights at Pumpkin Fest was a horseshoe tournament held down by the VFW, an antique tractor pull and a pie social. Abelman’s Department Store, where they’ve been selling quality goods since 1887 with attendant service you’ll never find at the Wal-Mart, held a sale. A pumpkin seed spitting contest was met and won. And of course there was food. Taken together, the sort of day many are familiar with only from old movies, if at all. The sort of day our corporate media delivery machine would treat as quaint while obliquely snickering at the rubes. Cynicism being the order of our day, as it helps keep the rubes in line.

When I arrived downtown, ventriloquist Dave Parker and Skippy already held a crowd of costumed children rapt. I first thought to show you pictures of these kid’s faces because they’re a treasure, but the Internet is no small town newspaper and I’ve no business plastering kid’s faces across it so Mr. Dave and Skippy will have to do:

I went over to the pie social at City Hall. Admission was cash on the barrelhead if you intended to eat pie, free to merely socialize. The table of pie stretched 40 feet or more, the auditorium was packed and the place bristled with anticipation. I was just in time to capture this:

I must be allergic to pie because my eyes misted over, so I went back out into the sun to clear them. In the grand American tradition, two members of the local Tea Party had a table set out on the street, taking their personal politics to the public square. Business was scant, beaten to Hell by snow cones.

Though popular movements on both extremes of our political spectrum currently dominate the news, that table served as reminder that our retail politics have shifted from the street to the Internet and social media, where we gnash the dry kernels of our myriad grievances 24/7. We need never face our neighbor in disagreement, need never consider dissenting opinion. That means too many of us now try to remake our community in our own proprietary image, taking little account of our neighbors.

We ought treat this newfound digital liberty with better care, as each of us sitting alone venting our miseries into the ether means we’re free to neglect what it means to be a neighbor.  And regardless of intention, in such isolation we end up working against our community’s greater health.

No matter what you choose to believe, that’s no way to teach those children on that stage how to be either a good neighbor or a good citizen.

Anyway, some days are just to celebrate who we are and at least at Pumpkin Fest, most folk paid politics and its attendant grievance no mind. The autumn sun was brilliant. Kids laughed and skipped and sang. Adults proudly embraced their community, while Dave Parker with his goofy songs and invariably creepy sidekick Skippy held children of all ages in happy thrall.

Though I never did learn why the helicopter guy didn’t show, and me having set ten bucks aside for to purchase a bird’s eye view.

King Copper -- Prelude

Among my favorite drives along Superior's basin is the 24 miles or so of two lane blacktop named South Boundary Road that runs up and down and all around through splendid woods from the Park Headquarters of the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness to the Presque Isle unit on the western edge of the park. It’s what you call “Seasonal”. That is it’s not plowed so in winter you travel it at your own risk. Like every other day I suppose, but more so.

To get there off the Gogebic Range, head out of Wakefield and hook a quick left onto County Road 519 to leave civilization behind. In Thomaston -- which lost its post office in 1926 but was once a happening place -- take a second left and you’re headed straight north into mostly nothing but a waving ocean of trees until the Presque Isle River falls out from the southeast to greet you on the right.

From there north becomes relative and after a bit you meet up with the aforementioned South Boundary Road. Along County 519 lies today’s story.

We’ve dug copper in the region for better than 5,000 years and times being tough, we’ve returned to take some more. A company named Orvana intends to dig a mine between the Black and the Presque Isle River, out in the woods near the shore of Superior. They call it “Copperwood”, designed to sound like a bucolic subdivision but reachable only via County Road 519. Fourteen years the job creators say, they’ll pound copper from hard rock and make the region worth something again. Sell the treasure on the open market so American firms can bid for our copper against the Chinese or whomever. Create jobs. Make some money. Fourteen good years maybe more, to help reinvigorate our community. Win win.

On the last day of September, a group of people got together at the Wakefield Twp. Hall. The mood was celebratory, the way it is when folk gather to slap themselves on the back for a job well done.

Turns out, Orvana will contribute something less than a quarter of the $3.5 million it’ll cost to convert 519 into an industrial service road, which meager percentage was sufficient for all involved to tout the virtues of public/private cooperation, even despite 75% of the tab being left to you and me. Giddy with enthusiasm and as reported by the Ironwood Daily Globe the next day, State Senator Tom Casperson took the opportunity to exclaim:

“Let’s put our people to work and let’s not accept people telling us that we’re ruining the environment. We won’t accept that. Together, they can’t stop us.”

They? Who the Hell is they?

The legacy of mining litters the Superior Basin like fallen leaves in autumn. From ancient copper pits on Isle Royale east to Sault Ste. Marie, which canal was dug so we could haul riches away from the place, northwest from there to the copper, gold and platinum around Marathon Ontario, southwest to the famous Wasabi Iron Range in Minnesota, across to my home turf of the Gogebic Range and finally back to the proposed Copperwood on the western edge of the Keweenaw Fault where famous mines once sprung up atop ancient pits. We’ll not escape the legacy of mining along our scenic drive and will have ample opportunity to decide for ourselves what that’s meant to the region and how it continues to inform the culture.

At any rate, County Road 519 isn’t where we’ll make the case either way, as it’ a done deal.

I just wanted you to know that even before final permits for the mine have been let, work on the road has begun and is scheduled for completion in 2013.

So if you'd prefer to drive Michigan County 519 and see that:

leading to this,

which after a short distance culminates here,

then you’d best take the opportunity sooner rather than later, ‘cause all the way from Wakefield right up to the South Boundary Road, County 519 is about to be crawling with heavy equipment.

King Copper demands no less, in the name of preserving multigenerational despair.

Where Eagles (Almost) Dare

For decades I’ve longed to capture an excellent photo of an eagle on the wing and for decades they’ve evaded me, proving I made the right choice when deciding not to become a wildlife photographer.

These days, eagles are recovered around the Superior Basin to the extent that when coming up over a blind hill on some two-lane road you might surprise one worrying fresh roadkill, so I suppose there's yet a chance.

In the interim, there's this. Captured with the Toy Canon two weeks ago…

The 51st of these United States

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan has long been treated as the suspect cousin with special skills who only gets his seat at the family table for so long as those skills are needed and when they’re not, the invitation gets lost in the mail. But just let some war effort require iron or the price of copper spike, and the mosquitos of outside interests swarm the place like it’s the first warm blood of spring.

When not being exploited for its “inexhaustible” resources, the region is mostly ignored by the State Capital in Lansing. Periodically, some local will launch a campaign for the U.P. (as it’s colloquially known) to secede from the State of Michigan and become the State of Cloverland, a distinctly misleading name for such a rugged state of being.

Yet on maps, the Upper Peninsula looks like no part of Michigan at all, connected only by the Mackinac Bridge. The late John Voelker, a splendid writer and Michigan Supreme Court Justice said “The best thing that could happen to the U.P. would be for someone to bomb the bridge”. Judge Voelker was no one’s fool though if uttered today his thoughts on the Mighty Mac might earn the good judge a visit from the Department of Homeland Security right quick.

Just the same, if the bridge vanished into the Straits of Mackinac, the only thing bordering the U.P that isn’t Lake Superior would be Wisconsin, who had her chance to claim this land but didn’t much want it then and can’t have it now.

Wisconsin shills herself as the Northwoods with supper clubs, family resorts, fishing guides and shops that hawk “genuine” Indian moccasins to tourists, but to cross the Mississippi watershed divide is to leave that noise behind and enter a world apart. Then those roads that in WI lead to resorts become fire lanes and logging roads leading mostly to nowhere but more woods.

A landscape of long shadow, hard rock and forest so deep it’s a national treasure in need of preservation and a towering resource crying out for harvest, depending.

The Northwoods is a tough, glorious place with a checkered past. To look at it today you wouldn’t think that not so long ago damned near every tree in the Upper Peninsula was cut down. Or that cougar and wolves were trapped out. Eagles nearly gone too. Or that the ridges now dressed in autumn’s finest were crowned by dozens of mines belching smoke skyward, while stamp mills pounding stone to separate copper from poor rock shook the earth like giants walking. And the towns that grew to support the industry, towns with names like Iron Belt and Bessemer, these swarmed over with immigrants who brought their own customs, which were made new in a new place. Notably, those included the Finns with their saunas and the Cornish with their pasties and thank goodness for both.

You’d never guess the region was honeycombed by rails that led all the way to places like Chicago. Now the tracks are mostly gone, rails recycled, grades converted to snowmobile trails or let go fallow.

Marquette, the biggest city in the U.P., can only be reached by two-lane. Just last week, Frontier Airlines announced its intention to cease air service to the Gogebic/Iron County Airport as of next March, threatening yet further isolation.

And so it goes.

I was talking to a man and his wife, who live on a splendid spit of land they rightly call their own. He said It’s right there in the deed. I own the land but don’t own the minerals beneath it. Some mining company owns those. They can come and put me off my own land for ‘fair market value’.

A friend told me that’s true of most everyone up here who owns a piece of God’s green earth. Are they squatters on their own land?  Tenant Farmers who don’t farm? Whatever the word or phrase, it’d be particularly American, you betcha.

One thing’s certain: it can’t be “landowner." Not when some company you've never heard of preemptively partnered with government in order to put you off your own land by writ as needs might arise.

And it’s not like the mining company pays these folk’s property taxes either. Which would seem only fair, considering.

I suppose that’s emblematic of the central dilemma we’ll explore together over the next year, when we’re not otherwise telling tall tales and having fun in the woods.

These folk who live in splendid isolation, who sustenance hunt and fish, burn wood and propane for heat, who invariably wave to you after you’ve given them wide berth with your car as they walk the gravel shoulder of two-lane blacktop, these people have always just wanted to be taken by the rest of us for what they honestly are. They’ve long since earned that respect and deserve no less, for past services rendered.

Instead, they just keep being taken. By outsiders who don’t live here permanent and never could.

Along the Underwood Grade, Gogebic County, MI

Notes From the Field

Autumn takes a hard turn…

The low pressure system that for the last week sat stationary over the lower Great Lakes and brought miserable weather to the midsection of the country while spinning persistent showers up along the south shore of Superior has finally been nudged on. Clouds that for days gently cloaked the tops of the Bessemer Bluffs greeted dawn this morning as fierce portents -- roiled, fractured and ominous. You didn’t have to pay really close attention in order to know the jig was up.

I began yesterday by canoeing one of my favorite lakes in the Ottawa National Forest and if I’ve ever spent a prettier morning there I don’t recall it. Overcast with just a hint of fog, the water was as glass and mirrored the colors of the forest that rings it.

The ripples on the surface came from my canoe. They radiated out across the entire lake. And either the intense yellow trees about fried the sensors on my Toy Canon SLR. Either that or I’ve not yet figured out how best to use it.

Later in the day I packed in to Nonesuch and there found autumn in all its quiet splendor, fallen leaves dressing the hard black stone of the old mine's crumbling foundations. Quietude unknown in any city.

By the time I walked back out to the car I was warm and moist with sweat. It was a joy to scoop handfuls of ice water from the bottom of my cooler and splash it over me. Did some good work while there, I think. Though as is always the case with film you don’t find out you haven’t until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Regardless, it was about as fine a day as could be had.

I suppose it’s true in all big sky country, but for most of us it’s rare to plainly see a season turn upon a single day and so this one did today. By midmorning, the breeze had picked up and the clouds began to spit. By afternoon the storm was full blown and it was 48 degrees, the wind a steady 20/25 mph from the NW with gusts I’d guess as high as forty.

Ravens hung in the air like kites. Geese, for all their squawking persistence flew backwards trying to seek safe haven in a field, their big heavy bodies caught up in the wind. Trees roar, when bent so far.

It’s tough to tell just how much rain fell in horizontal sheets. It can’t be enough, as the region’s been locked in drought for a long time now, but maybe it’ll feed the rivers enough so that fish can finally come in from the big lake and do their autumn thing.

Time for that grows short. As does time for everything that thrives this side of freezing.

The rain slackened with sunset and a great hole appeared near the horizon to the west. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight”, they say. We’ll see. The weatherman can’t ever seem to get it right up here, maybe old sailors can. What’s true is that clouds still race across the heavens.

I’m looking forward to roaming the woods tomorrow, as what leaves can fall will have fallen to cover the forest floor with fast fading brightness and everywhere it’ll be different than it was even just yesterday. No matter how bucolic some days going forward may yet be, this place has today turned its face toward winter and now, there’s no going back.

A Most Superior Place

Lake Superior is aptly named. The greatest freshwater sea in the world, like an ocean it makes its own weather. Around Superior's basin, resurgent wilderness feeds from it -- a rich and evolving emerald necklace draped over the shoulders of a watery god, resolutely indifferent to human concern.

Within an easy day’s drive of this wonderland live more than 20 million North Americans. Most of these people are at least vaguely aware of its existence. Some have even seen it. Few know it well.

Those hardy folk who know Superior best live within its reach. That’s not an easy place to be. With  few exceptions, the towns there are small and getting smaller, as populations age and young folk leave, drawn away by an urban song promoting opportunity as the one true way to easy living.

If not that, then a new kind of wilderness at least.

What most of us consider routine goods & services are, in this region, too often hard to come by or don't exist at all. What most of us might consider poverty is commonplace. How many people do you know that must scrounge wood so to stay unfrozen in their homes through the long, dark winter?

These towns and villages are remnants of a robust past. At different times Voyageurs roamed the rivers and forests, taking furs. Lumbermen then cut those forests to the ground, with the magnificent hardwood and fabled pine used to build cities like Chicago and Detroit. Miners blasted and dug six dangerous days a week in order to scavenge copper and iron that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, which led to the United States of America as it is today.

Quintessentially American, places with names like Bessemer and Ironwood, Ontonagon and Grand Marias were settled by waves of immigrant workers from across Europe and beyond. And of course, before any of these were the Potawatomi, Ojibwa and Sioux, whose cultural memories of this place far precede any invasive white folk and whose presence on this land remains vibrant, which keeps ancient memory alive.

Over the next year or so I’ll explore many facets of the Superior basin. You’re invited to come along, in more or less real time.

Whether you already know and love the region, have visited upon occasion, or if you’ve never come within 10,000 miles of the these northwoods, together (if vicariously) we’ll come to know this Superior place and its people better. Whether by seeking them out and listening to their stories, or by eavesdropping on locals in their diners.

I guarantee that if what you take from rural U.S.A. is all that the media spits up on a daily basis, some characters in the story of this lake will surprise you.

We’ll slog through swamps, hike forests, paddle streams and lakes, meaning primarily to document ruins of failed construct before multigenerational despair and resurgent wilderness eats them. Take periodic rest beneath the shade of a hemlock beside shining waters so blue it hurts the eyes to look. And together, we’ll sit in awe on the Superior shore after night falls, the heavens ascend and the Northern Lights dance.

It’s time to hit the road to see what we can see. Maybe even learn a bit along the way. Feel free to ride shotgun -- that seat is reserved for you.