The North Shore™ Cash Machine

Grand Marais MN during high tourist season is like a funhouse Hall of Mirrors, where everything's distorted and little is as it first appears. 'Cept you'll pay way more at Grand Marais and mightn't have as much fun.

Superior's shore in northern Minnesota is a slopping, hard rock place. Government owns much of the land, with the State Parks and National Forests that today blanket the area being the major economic resource of the region, as it's those that draw visitors up from Duluth, down out of Ontario and from all points wherever beyond.

When folk visit all that natural splendor, it's only Grand Marais that exists to service their every need.

Heather & I first traveled there maybe 35 years ago and found the sleepy vestige of a once marginally prosperous community long since slipped in the direction of economic ruin, as so many villages along the lake were then and are still. As perverse as it seems to say, that was essentially its charm.

Very little intruded upon the quietude. Once you visited the tiny but outstanding Sivertson Gallery hard by the harbor, you had your choice of local diners or a couple more upscale restaurants for fresh fish. Then you could take an evening stroll past Coast Guard Station out to the old break wall on the lake and that was about it.

But even then, if you sniffed around a bit a certain attitude prevailed.

Once, having just traveled east to west across the Canadian shore of Superior and back into the States, I found myself amidst a few locals gathered early in the morning at a small establishment -- ordinarily an enlightening, often a pleasant experience. A lady commented about the weather "on the north shore".

Having just been there, I chimed in with fresh information about Ontario's weather.

Instantly, there fell a deep and pregnant pause. It was like being in a cartoon western saloon, where the piano suddenly stops and the whole place falls quiet when the villain walks in. Then this lady peered down her nose at me and with a gaze intended to wither the abject ignorance right out of my poor pitiful self she positively sniffed, "We are the North Shore".

Sure 'ya are, lady. And Marathon's to your south.

As I said, it's not like Grand Marais didn't have its pleasures. For instance, perhaps the finest walleye I've ever eaten was at the Birch Terrace -- a place of impeccable service offering hearty Northwoods cuisine and a great narrative besides. And therein lies a story to illustrate the split personality of Grand Marais.

Crafted of pine log as a private residence in 1898, the Birch Terrace is a stately old building with a rich history, built on a rise above the lake. An Indian burial ground is said to have been in what's now the front yard. Tales were told of the moose that'd swim out from the dock to greet  incoming boats and beg pouches of tobacco from travelers. The proclamation that created the fabled Gunflint Trail was signed by the Governor of Minnesota in the living room, where today meals are served.

When Heather & I first ate there, much was made of this history and that added immeasurably to the excellence of the overall experience. The richness of the place helped make for an evening of Northwoods romance that'll live on forever in our hearts because it was part of what helped make the Superior Basin our destination of choice.

In today's Birch Terrace, you'll find no mention of history. The menu is reduced to standard tourist fare. When there for old time's sake this past August, I've never seen a staff so overmatched, even with the place mostly empty. Orders were wrong. Meals arrived late or cold and then dispatched back to the kitchen for remedy. Apologies were flung like day old fish fritters.

You can still sit in the handsome old dining room but now the place sports a beer garden terrace too, where on a summer's eve you can listen to a mediocre singer cover old Jimmy Buffett tunes.

All the same, when I visited there in May just before the opening of "the Season", Grand Marais was quietly sublime. A whitefish dinner at the Angry Trout as the sun set over Superior was everything it ought to be and then some.

You could walk the town without brushing shoulders with a crowd. The lakefront past the break wall remains a great place for an evening's stroll. While there you'll see what might be the largest collection of balanced rock art to be found anywhere around the lake:

And I stayed in a fine, family run motel a few miles north from Grand Marais, for a good price.

But what you don't want to do is come off the road late on a Friday afternoon in August, as I did when running down from our trek to Pukaskwa and back. Then you'll find a town near to bursting and too proud of the fact by half.

You'll wait an hour & a half to get seated at the Angry Trout, where you can spend time in quiet observance of class distinctions thrown to high relief. Vacationing families, half-drunk hikers and plenty of patricians from who knows where decked out in positively unblemished high end outdoor gear jostle as they down free-flowing sedations of choice and all the while studiously avoiding direct eye contact with each other.

Then when you take that evening walk, you'll not have to worry about being alone:

And if you're really lucky, you'll have the pleasure of paying for the last room in the region as much or more than is charged most nights for a proper room in downtown Chicago -- where there're hundreds of fine restaurants, a veritable cornucopia of cultural choices and a splendid lakefront to boot, though admittedly not Superior.

Grand Marais prides itself on what it offers the contemporary traveler. But there's an awful lot of Superior shore away from it in all directions, including north.

So should you plan a trip to the area, go offseason and enjoy its many authentic pleasures. Or secure reservations well in advance at the Nanabijou Lodge, or some other family run establishment in the region, then head into town at your own discretion.

Otherwise, get your overpriced ticket to the carnival. Then grab a seat -- if you can find one -- and listen to the barkers sing...

Snapshots -- On the Road in Minnesota

The Nanabijou Lodge

When laying out his 1909 Plan of Chicago, famed architect Daniel Burnham declared: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized."

The Nanabijou Holding Company out of Duluth took Burnham's admonition to heart when in 1927 it appropriated the name of a god to sign a 99 year lease on 3,330 acres of wild land along the northern Minnesota shore of Superior. There they planned to build a magnificent private club designed for exclusive use by a membership limited to 3,330 persons of privilege. That's exactly one acre apiece. (Numerology, anyone?)

The plans called for 150 sleeping rooms inside a spacious clubhouse surrounded by a golf course, tennis courts and other amenities. Membership was restricted to friends and friends of friends, with folk actually living in Minnesota limited to 25% of the total. Charter members included Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Ring Lardner, though they didn't have to pay for the privilege and you'd have to wonder exactly whose friends of Duluth gentry those famous east coast men were.

At any rate there's no record extant that this trio of notable sporting gents ever actually visited. They were exceptions that prove the rule, I guess.

The purpose of the club as defined in the charter was to allow for members to "Live and learn. Learn why the raspberry follows the fireweed; learn how the fern seed clings to its fronds; learn the ways of the kingbird, the haunts of the wood thrush; learn the pasturage of the moose and the deer and the home life of the beaver..."

In such ways do people justify using the name of a god they don't believe in. But don't scoff overmuch. There's plenty of the same sort of well-meaning back to nature fecklessness in the language of our own contemporary 'New Age' seekers. You can talk the talk but it's tough to walk the walk, when you've driven six hours to your embarkation point...

Much as Burnham's ambitious Plan for Chicago was never fully realized, neither were the Nanabijou Company's plans for their club.

A clubhouse was built, with a great hall and 24 guestrooms. The fireplace that anchors the west end of the hall was constructed by a local stonemason from 200 tons of rounded native rock and remains the largest stone fireplace in the State of Minnesota.

The Nanabijou Club opened its doors to much fanfare on July 7th, 1929, with the Governor of the State doing the christening honors. And if you know your American history, you already know what's next.

That same year on October 29th, Black Friday arrived. The world plunged into The Great Depression and the ambitions of the Nanabijou Holding Company fell to naught.

By 1935, the property was in foreclosure. In 1939 it was sold. Then it was sold again. And again. And again. Along the way, most of the original 3,330 acres were sold off too, where today you'll find the picturesque Judge C.R. Magny State Park -- open to all comers, no membership required.

But in some big plans there's a kernel of lasting greatness. And so it was, with the Nanabijou Lodge.

What remains of those grandiose plans is one of the most striking publically available architectural interiors anywhere on the Superior Basin. The great hall of the clubhouse having been long since converted to a dining room, the Cree inspired art deco design by French artist Antoine Goufee was instrumental in the Nanabijou Lodge being named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

The addition of a solarium carefully followed that design and it's there that guests can pass the time reading or playing board games or even enjoy high tea on a summer's afternoon.

Today the Lodge is owned by the Ramey Family and they are most gracious hosts. The Lodge boasts one of the better restaurants in the region. The otherwise well appointed rooms have neither television nor telephone and cell signal remains uncertain that far up the shore, so it's a place of quiet Northwoods elegance offering the opportunity for reflection or even just the chance to snatch a few precious days away from a screeching modern world.

Which means that in the end, the greatest ambitions of the Nanabijou Holding Company were met -- though I suppose it unlikely they'd have agreed -- because today the Lodge fulfills its original mission in letting folk step out through its grand French doors and into a world where such magic as wild raspberries and fern fronds and wood thrush song and dozing deer can still be learned from, if you've the mind.

If all that's not enough, the splendid Nanabijou Lodge is also one of the best values on the entire Minnesota shore.

And you can drop in this coming Thursday, to learn something of the alternative...

Vintage Delight

We touched on Smokey the Bear while Playing With Fire and it's absolutely true that fire prevention/control is always a concern in the Northwoods, this year being no exception as wildfire has ravaged both wild acreage and settled places alike.

It's also true that at the core of my work there's always been a fascination with cultural artifacts.

On State Highway 61 along Minnesota's Superior shore and north of Grand Marais, I found this.

A splendid, vintage example of cultural iconography and most unusual in that there by the side of the highway Smokey still stands, though made only of wood and exposed to the vicissitudes of Superior weather, day in and day out for who knows how many years now. I mean, just take a look at those jeans:

Fit That Beneath the Christmas Tree...

Roadside attractions run the gamut from silly to sublime. The path around the Superior Basin is no exception. For example...

In Ishpeming stands 'Old Ish'. Made in 1884, originally painted black and sporting three fountains -- one for horses, one for dogs and one for humans. Ish is a local icon made world famous through the writings of favorite son John Voelker:

Outside of Marquette there's Lakenland:

And in my very own Gogebic is the Paulding Light, which mystery has attracted wandering tourists year-round over decades.

But in a week or so when we turn southwest out of Grand Marais to visit the fabled Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota, we'll find that there, these tourist attractions take on a decidedly industrial bent.

For it's on a hilltop ridge high above the massively undermined town of Virginia Minnesota, that you'll find a couple of the Iron Giant's very own discarded Tonka Toys -- tires purposefully flattened no doubt, to keep little boys of all ages from trying to send them hellbent down the hill:

The Fur Trade -- Forever in an Amber Glow

Before the residency at Dan's Cabin, we'd visited the resting places of Omett & Nanabijou, then were hurtling off the north shore towards Thunder Bay and our last border crossing together. Let's pick things up there. Then we can dig into Minnesota and complete our circumnavigation of the Superior Basin...

No activity centered on Superior is as celebrated as the fur trade.

From a 120mm transparency -- August 2012

In part that's due to its antiquity. Furs were exported to Europe from New France in economically significant numbers as early as the 1630's.

Then there're the legendary companies involved -- The Hudson's Bay Company, The North West Company and later the American Fur Company, which secured a monopoly on the American trade. That monopolistic advantage set John Jacob Astor off on the path that made him one of the wealthiest men in the world, and that allowed Astor to become a lasting avatar for what it means to be a successful American businessman. Noblesse oblige, indeed.

There's also the sheer longevity of the enterprise. The fur trade ran some 250 years, give or take. No resource extraction around Superior has lasted even near so long or made so many fortunes. And that primarily due to the fecundity of the humble beaver, whose fascinating and most provocative impact on world economic history can best be explored by delving into the thoroughly researched Fashionable Felted Fur: a World History of the Beaver Hat, by Kelly Feinstein-Johnson.

Trust me, what you likely don't know about beaver hats is a whole bunch.

Major nations battled over the fur trade. At white folk's behest, Native tribes warred to displace each other from ancestral homes, only to facilitate the removal of what once was theirs. Due to the world's insatiable appetite for fur, the cultural character of the entire region changed, not once but many times in succession.

But I think the reason the fur trade lives on in our memories even today is due to primarily to the Voyageurs.

Their robust approach to life and work bequeathed an incredibly rich narrative fueled by a litany of story and song, which were celebrated during legendary Rendezvous'. This narrative recounted deeds of authentically heroic nature and made the Voyageurs emblematic of both what we truly were and  -- of more importance -- what we still prefer to see in ourselves.

Even when most all of us reside in cities a universe removed from the ancestral trials of life led in the wild.

No matter our daily struggles, few among us today must do anything like paddle 30 miles into a rising sea to reach safe harbor, make camp in freezing rain, then wake up the next day and carry not one but two 90# packs on our backs while traversing a rough-hewn portage. And do it all again the next day and the day after that for an entire season.

Thiers was, as they say, a time when men were men. I thought of that some, when as many as four times daily I hauled my sorry self with my piddling 100# of gear up & down the short but steep hill to make the quarter mile to and fro between Dan's Cabin & the car...

I'll not try to distill the history of the fur trade here, as it seems a hopeless task and the resources available to those of you who're interested are rich. Rather, let's do the tourist gig for a bit, as the finest 'Living History Museums' on Superior are both dedicated to the legacy of the fur trade and the legend of the Voyageurs.

So here're a few brief sentences on each, accompanied by select images...

From a 120mm transparency -- August 2012

Fort William Historical Park is in Thunder Bay Ontario, its present site a few miles up the Kaministiquia River from where the original fort once stood. You can't miss it, as signage from both directions but especially when driving up from the States is positively ubiquitous.

It's a large place, wonderfully done. When the presence of tourists is slight, it's easy to succumb to the notion that you've been transported to another time. Especially when sitting in the shade beneath a tree in the sun-drenched open square, enjoying a positively splendid late summer morning and you're unexpectedly greeted by such delights as this:

I freely admit that having just come down the north shore from Pukaskwa and considering everything we've seen and done over the past year, to hear this song in this place at that golden moment misted my vision. For a moment at least, I could almost believe...

Then later that morning a lovely young Ojibwa woman graciously introduced me to the joys of wild rice popped in bear fat. Can't beat that with a stick, eh?

I've worked Fort William a few times over the past 20 years or so and the Canoe Shed is my favorite place. Not merely because it's there that fine craftspeople still build canoes by hand just as craftsmen did 200 years ago, though that'd be reason enough. In addition, the light in this building is some of the most exquisite light I've ever had the pleasure to work:

Taken from vintage 35mm transparencies

Fort William Historical Park is a visual and educational delight, the people who work there as warm and welcoming as any you'll meet at similar sites anywhere. It's well worth the visit whether traversing the big lake by boat or car. Give it a whole day and see if you too can step back in time...

From a 120mm transparency -- August 2012

From a 120mm transparency -- August 2012

Across the border back in the States and just 30 miles over water from the original Fort William is Grand Portage National Monument. A much smaller facility, it nevertheless rivals it's larger cousin in excellence of presentation.

The Grand Portage around the falls of the Pigeon River were in use by Native Peoples for millennia before white folk discovered it's utility as a passage from Superior into the great Northwest. There may have been a trading post at the site as early as 1718, but with the formation of the North West Company in 1799, the Grand Portage came to lasting economic importance.

And today that crucial role in a Nation's development is recognised through the site's designation as a National Monument of the United States.

Should you find yourself in nearby Grand Marais MN and need an escape from the distinctly mixed blessings of a once sleepy harbor town since transformed into a contemporary tourist trap, be sure to take the short drive north and pay a visit. It'll be well worth your time.

Job Creators

I used to like to go to work,

but they shut it down.

I got a right to go to work,

but there's no work here to be found.

And they say

we're gonna have to pay what's owed,

we're gonna have to reap from some seed that's been sowed.

Mark Knopfler -- 'Telegraph Road', 1982

Ontonagon, MI -- October 2011

There'd been a paper mill at Ontonagon MI for something like 90 years. In large part, that's why the community survived the 20th Century when so many other towns around the U.P. didn't.

Ontonagon MI -- October 2012

Smurfit Stone Corporation owned this mill, though they didn't build it and merely bought in late in the game. Right up to the end, the operation at Ontonagon turned a regular profit and was said to be the only paper plant in the State of Michigan to meet or exceed air & water quality standards.

After years of aggressively acquiring other paper companies, Smurfit Stone found itself saddled with crushing debt. When the economy collapsed the Company resorted to Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection, seeking legal relief from it's bad decisions. This reinvention included closing the mill at Ontonagon, the largest employer in the County.

At the time, financial analysts at Credit Suisse wrote that this & another closure in Montana was good business, as the resultant lack of ready supply would help push prices up for packaging materials, thus increasing Company profit.

President and Chief Operating Officer of the Company Steve Klinger agreed, saying:

"These decisions were made to ensure the Company's long-term growth and profitability and do not reflect on the hard work and commitment of the employees at the Ontonagon mill."

With news of the closing, the community rolled up its collective sleeves and went to work, trying to line up investors to buy the facility. In Bankruptcy Court, the good citizens of Ontonagon petitioned the judge to prohibit the Company from destroying the plant and with it, perhaps their town.

"We don't want stimulus money. We don't want handouts. We have potential investors. All we want is for these people to have the right to make a decent living", wrote one.

Their pleas went unmet.

Smurfit Stone exited bankruptcy and promptly sold the mill at Ontonagon to a Canadian salvage company. 90 years of community investment in blood, sweat and tears, sold for scrap.

Two days later, Smurfit Stone announced it had sold itself to yet another paper company. As part of the deal, ex-CEO Patrick Moore received 59.5 million dollars. General counsel Craig Hunt was entitled to 9 million if he found himself unemployed. Senior V.P. Steven Strickland copped nearly 7 million.

Nice work, if 'ya can get it.

Today, where once beat the economic lifeblood of Ontonagon, there're only acres upon acres of mostly empty field surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire. This fallow ground is kept watch over by private security, hired by the Company to  protect its remaining interests in Ontonagon, whatever in the world those might be.

What's true is this:

According to law, Smurfit Stone owned the mill at Ontonagon. It was theirs to do with as they pleased, for whatever reasons they chose. And it was widely considered only good business for them to do what they did.

What's also true is this:

They didn't build that mill, they just bought it. And once they decided to abandon the place, by any reasonable moral standard if anyone had right of ownership over that mill, it was the community of Ontonagon, as theirs was a generational investment that can't be measured in dollars.

Now prime lakefront land on Superior stands fallow, future disposition undetermined.

An ex-employee told me there'll never be housing built on the land as before the environmental laws of the last few decades, lime and other toxins inherent to the milling process were dumped onsite -- creating both one more manmade wilderness on Superior's shore and leaving another sure sign of the legacy bequeathed by Capital when given free reign over our fate. Which along with a wide variety of poisons has left an entire region in poverty and despair.

What advocates for 'Job Creators' seem to resolutely ignore is that while (for example) a paper plant processes lumber down to salable product, without a community of workers it'd process nothing, ever.

Without workers, there'd never have been a mill in Ontonagon. Without workers there'd never have been product to sell to finance the debt Smurfit Stone used to acquire other paper companies and dig itself so deep into the hole it could only resort to creative destruction as a last, best resort to reap profit from its poor choices.

Without workers from this community absorbed a fatal hit to ensure some other operation could never come into Ontonagon and compete, the executives of Smurfit Stone wouldn't have emerged from bankruptcy able to sell to another company and secure great piles of personal wealth for themselves in the bargain.

As of the 2000 Census, the median annual income of the 786 households in Ontonagon stood at $28,300.  You can bet both the number of households and the income has shrunk since. At any rate, that's chump change, for those who managed to manage this place right into dust.

The good citizens of Ontonagon didn't want charity. They didn't ask for a handout. They simply asked for the chance to keep their town alive by maintaining a facility it's onetime owner no longer cared to own. That opportunity was denied them.

Creative destruction, the Job Creators call that. They say it reflects the best of who we are and is a good and proper thing. They say without we hew to this overarching purpose, we'd no longer be America.

I say it's history repeating itself -- with honest, hardworking folk getting hosed over & over & over again.

And the only real difference between this mill at Ontonagon and the Wolverine Mohawk or Nonesuch or the Cliff location or dozens of other similar sites, left by Capital to crumble where once they stood?

This being the 21st Century and not the 20th, the Company recycled its mistakes for cold cash on the barrelhead.

Which means that 100 years from now no one like me will ever stand near the fabled Ontonagon River amidst the mysterious ruins of long abandoned promises and wonder...

"How did this come to be?"

Home is Where the Heart Is...

This is the path through autumnal woods leading to Dan's Cabin, which is the sturdy quarters built mostly by hand, nestled amidst stately Hemlock & now maintained by the Friends of the Porcupine Mountains for their Artist-in-Residence Program.

What's also true is that my path to Dan's Cabin began nearly 50 years ago, when my family traveled to Bessemer while on vacation, to visit my great grandfather in my mother's ancestral home.

Once there, it was from the 2nd story porch outside Martin Shefka's bedroom that I first stood in awe beneath a great expanse of wild sky brimming with Northern Lights.

Then I saw my first wild bear, a cub come down to the edge of the Black River for a drink. Uncle John said I'd best mind my P's & Q's, as momma surely watched from the cover of nearby forest.

That same day during a picnic near the mouth of the Black, I grew bored watching my bobber float static on sun-dappled water so jerked my pole to see if anything was there. With a flash, a magnificent Rainbow Trout leapt into the air, shards of water flying off glistening colored flanks. Then she was gone, unseen by anyone save me.

I wondered then as now -- had I been a bit more patient, would she have bit the worm I'd dangled just for her? Fish have since help teach me patience, but when I close my eyes I can summon this one up as if yesterday and will be able until the end of days, as she became my proverbial 'one that got away'.

Barely old enough to take my first adult vacation, a few years later with Heather I headed straight back. We were little more than kids then and in those bewitching black woods so near the great sea shining water, we began the bond that unites us still.

After that, not a year's gone by that I've not returned. This last year more often than ever and with overriding, often haunting purpose...

The Wolverine Mohawk Mill, October 2012 -- taken from a 120mm transparency

*

During my residency at Dan's Cabin, I poured myself into the place through my work, which is fast coming to an end.

I learned from a fellow river rat on the Presque Isle that Dick from Wakefield died last year. He greeted Death with the same stoic determination he'd led life.

Snowbirds (Slate-Colored Dark-eyed Junco) arrived early, down from their boreal forest haunts. Displeased by my presence in the woods, great flocks scattered whenever I went walking, only to reform behind.

I lived the season from high autumn straight through to impending winter, a first for me.

One morning well before dawn, I eavesdropped on a lengthy & robust conversation between Barred Owls spread wide throughout the forest and taken on the wing, which lent new meaning to the word "stereophonic".

When I arrived the weather was warm and bright, the fancy dress of the forest full. Then came a blow and after a couple days of gale force winds followed by eight days of persistent chill & intermittent rain broken only by the first bits of fleeting snow & skim ice, brittle yellow death blanketed the woods.

Pool on the Union River, October 2012 -- taken from a 120mm transparency

During that time, the Little Union River that runs past the cabin gained strength in voice. It went from a parched whisper to something more resembling the proper song of a stream running downhill over hard rock. It sang softly all day and proved especially beguiling after dark.

At night when the air was finally still and with no moon for guidance, I heard individual leaves drop to invisible ground.

If I learned anything about myself during the stay it was only confirmation of what I'd always half expected: in me there is a 'woodsy', the guy who townsfolk see only a couple times a year, come into town for supplies. I'd have happily stayed, even through the winter.

Late the night of my public presentation at the visitor's center, when all was quiet and I was again alone, I stepped out to look over and above the cabin for a peek at a clear glittering sky. That's the only place amidst the towering Hemlock to present an unobstructed view.

Just then, a shooting star blazed right there. I could only whisper thanks.

When I left Dan's Cabin to drive the South Boundary Road back towards Bessemer, the woods spoke plainly of coming winter, with long light casting dim shafts through mostly skeletal woods. And if there'd been any doubt, any pining hope remaining that a rush to the heart of seasonal darkness could somehow be delayed, Superior disabused that notion. By the time I reached the Presque Isle a wind howling straight out of the north hurled horizontal rain from over the farthest reaches of the big lake.

That stripped the last of autumn from the forest nearest its shore and the detritus of a most splendid season was scattered to the winds.

*

I'll come back 'round later, to extol the virtues of the people I met and the program I was honored to serve, as well as the Porcupine Mountains, which is likely the crown jewel of Michigan State Parks.

In the meantime, two days before my presentation, an article in a local newspaper reminded me that I was to give a reading, which in the interim since being accepted into the program in May I'd inconveniently forgotten.

So I spent a sunny afternoon sitting at the table in Dan's Cabin, writing this:

A Landscape of Perspective

I’m told that in most native languages there’s no word for Wilderness. That what we please to call “Aboriginal Peoples” never got around to shearing their cultures off from the landscape they live on and to them, wilderness is simply the world.

Somewhere along the line, encouraged by our increasingly inventive construct, emboldened by a destiny we held as manifest and driven by a compulsion to define everything in strictly human terms, our culture decided different.

I think that’s because as we banished the cold and the wind and even the night from our lives, we beheld these monuments to human ingenuity and basking in our achievement couldn't tolerate the fact that the world remains utterly indifferent to all human ambition, even to human life itself.

So we invented the concept of wilderness -- a beast to be subjugated or failing that destroyed and as our greatness grew so too did our separation from the world, which is -- after all -- everything in creation that sustains us.

As it turns out, for all our ingenuity, we've chosen an unsustainable path and in that choice have been proved most unwise.

So emblematic of wildness, the Superior Basin is littered with evidence of that lack of wisdom.

A difficult place to live, mostly we've come here to take. When we could take no more, we left. And as each resource played out, hard times replaced good.

Trappers took pelts until there were too few beasts left to skin, then they moved on. Out of the northeast lumbermen of story and song swept down and the great forest once thought inexhaustible fell like in a slow motion nuclear blast. Now the massive pine and sturdy Hemlock remain mostly only in sanctuaries, like this one.

And because this landscape is ancient and of surpassing geologic significance, we came to mine. Which interests have come sniffing around once again, hoping to claim the last of the region’s mineral riches.

With each passing wave of taking, this magnificent landscape altered the spirit of some who came and those who stayed put down roots in the rocky earth to raise families of their own so that their children and their children’s children might also live life with a spirit made large by being one with the world.

This place leaves no other choice -- you can accommodate it or die trying to bend it to your will -- there’s no third way.

Once again we live in hard times. And shrill voices ring in our ears that we must do this that or the other thing lest our culture is doomed and the Republic fall.

Well, no one can predict the future and anyone who pretends they can isn't to be trusted because it’s not your best interests they serve with the pretense.

What’s true is that the future is ours to make and what we make of it begins with what we believe. If you believe that darkness and despair fast encroach upon us, then you've chosen to help make it so.

I believe that in my lifetime we've turned a critical corner. That as a culture we've begun the long, slow journey away from the unwise view of the world we once clung to so fiercely.

Now, belief without evidence is merely faith and no good proof of anything.

I’m here to tell you that while traveling this Superior land over the last year, I've found it’s chock full of good folk who've stopped trying to bend the landscape to their will and are instead learning to live and to prosper having made their peace with this difficult place.

From artisan bakers in small towns to the new outfitters in Grand Marais whose owners spent three years and everything they had to convert a forlorn structure into the first ‘green’ building in Alger County. To artists and craftspeople and industrious folk of all stripe, I say there’s ample evidence that our ingenuity is at long last being balanced with overdue wisdom.

So I choose to believe that our future will be brighter than our past.

And you, you Friends of the Porkies, with your Dan’s cabin built not just from wood but from a profound generosity of spirit fueled by devotion to a wild place -- I hold you as evidence that what I believe is true.

And I’m proud to have made your acquaintance.