Shining Light on the Prairie - Meteorological Spring

Maybe that title should better read meteoroillogical...

Freeze/thaw, freeze/thaw then freeze some more makes for a wicked nasty season.

Racing across three hundred miles of freezing big water before smacking into the prairie, arctic winds howl. The grayest February skies seen 'round these parts in fifty-seven years persistently weep. Even when a warming sun shines, the landscape is bone chill.

Every day the sun doesn't make an appearance and that's most of them, the world is cruelly muted. It's voice, a crackling murmur.

Still, signs of hope are found. And what's hope for anyway, if not to rely on during hard times?

Late autumn, I purged an accidental strawberry plant from the place it claimed in our garden where we'd let it grow wild through last summer, just to see. Purged that sucker with extreme prejudice, as only the squirrels benefited and not so much at that.

Yet there it is. Come back through hard frozen ground, even beneath a sheath of ice.

The new lens helped turn this barely transitional season that's normally opaque and indolent into a rich opportunity for fieldwork. On the right occasion, the freeze/thaw not only reveals but frames a post-seasonal spectrum of life and death. I'll remember that and be better prepared, next year.

"Death is life", the late poet Patrick O'Neil wrote. So it is. On the prairie as well as in the Northwoods, and everywhere else besides.

At least I know for certain that last autumn the Goldfinches twittering about outside my window feasted on this purple coneflower as it fell.

Beneath prairie tallgrass collapsed from exhaustion…

…and invasive bull thistle gone sandpaper sharp,

to inside the crust of barren native oaks obscured by waving ghosts, I believe renewed life grows.

Soon enough this will be Blazing Star shining with riotous life, not just its bones:

Call that a matter of faith if you wish, but in this one tough little bugger below, I keep finding early proof.

After the next chunk of polar vortex departs, I trust I'll find it still.

Shining Light on the Prairie – Late Winter, 2019

This year's dark season was by & large a forced march gone long from the start. Then in February between the stinking polar vortex and an ice storm, a new lens arrived. Count that as just in time, for me.

Step away from the screen, winter demanded. So I did.

Next week about this time, winter's over. My meteorologist tells me so. Meanwhile, the new lens is a keeper. 

Occasionally, the light is good and the wind doesn't blow too hard across the prairie. That and the inevitable turning of the season from dark to light is all I need know, for now.

With longer days, late winter's sun is warming. The season freezes, thaws then freezes again. Inexorably, cold darkness melts. There is but to look.

That first morning with the new lens, stepping gingerly so as not to slip and break my fool neck (or the lens) on a world sheathed in ice, I spotted the first frog of the year.

Maybe you don't see that speckled frog caught like a memory by winter in frozen Lamb's Ear. I didn't, at first. Now I can't unsee it.

But should you drive a harder bargain than me and find an illusory frog doesn't cut it to pin all seasonal hopes on, there's this:

Room With View(s)

To creatives of all sorts, everywhere --

October of 2012, for two weeks I held an artist's residency at Dan's Cabin in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness, courtesy of the Friends of the Porkies.

The experience enriched my perspective on the real world and the folk who dedicate their lives to the protection and nourishment of it.

You'd like to think wilderness could just maintain itself. But, alas. The older I get, the greater the meaning of 'perpetual maintenance' becomes.

Two weeks at Dan's Cabin enriched me in ways that continue to unfold. If you've never spent two weeks living in the woods, I heartily recommend it. The wilderness will embrace you, give it half the chance.

If that's not your cup of tea, then find other residencies more to your liking and creative skillset. There's every sort of welcoming safe haven out there for creatives, maintained in all manner of fine places, catering to about every creative discipline under the sun.

My stay at Dan's Cabin was greatly productive. A fine place to work.

Maybe your residency wherever doing whatever will be too. I urge you to find out. You can start here.

The effect those two weeks had on my work is ongoing. My hosts were among the finest folk I've met. If I could change anything, it'd be that I didn't wait so long before giving it a shot, which would've left me more years to reap the benefit.

So go for it. Because the years do flow on…

Can you Camus?

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

                                                              – Albert Camus

Winter Solstice, 2018

Each year sometime late in October running into November and on the occasion the sun actually shines, the Superior Northwoods luxuriates in long, low light. Though the hours to do it are short, seeing is made easy because there's so little left that obscures, not even the otherwise customary brilliance lent life by a sunny afternoon.

Night falls earlier by the day, morning comes later each night. Invariably the world ratchets down colder and darker. Yet on crisp clear nights, it squeezes stars from the sky like at no other time of year.

Ancient people brought intuitive understanding of the natural world to bear upon stone, and thereafter each winter the stones told them when tidal seasons again turned toward the light. As inevitable as the dark, was the light. Provided one somehow managed to hang tight until fecund spring, lesson learned.

For most of us along the northern tier the lights are on and inside, warm air circulates. Indifferent to our many conveniences, the shortest day of any year still signals the same celestial turning ancient peoples once took for a sure sign of gods. 

Today, those folk living in the northwoods, on the prairie or the plains currently gauging their dwindling propane supplies while burning right through the woodpile still mark the day. As does every other soul with at least one eye keen to the real world. By changing faster than we can keep up with, that has us collectively riding the receding edge of human glory.

The great tide of seasons flows forth. That's marked for certain in the sky. This celestial sign occurs with or without any circle of stones to see it through. It happens just the same, whether or not your view is obscured.

So tomorrow about this time when the Earth reliably shifts, should your evening be clear and crisp, go out and take notice beneath the Little Spirit Moon accompanied by glittering winter stars. That moon and those stars remember what you don't.

Then maybe dance to what was, what is and what looks to be pretty soon again.

The best of this season to us all.

The Witch of November

©PhilKuceraPhoto

Many thanks to my dear friend Phil. As he chases angry seas, I needn't.

*

Be assured, we've tempted Lake Superior since first we arrived on the basin.

Yeah, it's likely the earliest peoples walked in. But shortly thereafter they went in, it's too long and arduous a way around. The relationship's been fraught ever since.

Visit the cold, deep waters of the big lake through enough seasons and you'll see her rage. Furies grip the wind and that whips the sea, which rises mighty against a sky turned every shade of roiled blue, slate grey and black. The ground trembles beneath you, when the lake hurls itself against the shore.

Forty-three years ago today, the Witch of November claimed the Edmund Fitzgerald and the 29 souls that rode her to Superior's bottom. The Fitz was no small boat. Longer than any puny football field. Bigger than the Great Republic pictured below.

Men stand small, beside that.

What's made by humans often dwarfs them. Put men in a boat that size, stuff the boat with 8,000 tons of shifting ore pellets and set it all out on the middle of Superior in a storm, then the Promethean feat of ingenuity and engineering that floats the lot of it might suddenly be rendered woeful insufficient. The men themselves, infinitesimal.

The sea neither notices nor cares.

Quickly! Quickly!

The waves rise up again. The distant view draws close,

Land ho, I call!

                                                                               - Goethe

The Edmund Fitzgerald suffered catastrophic failure during a gale somewhere out there, in open water. Well beyond anything like safe harbor.

At nearly 200 feet longer than the water there is deep, its bow might've crashed into the bottom at the same time the all but inverted stern still perched high above the waves. As the Mighty Fitz porpoised down and the tons of taconite inside her rolled, many if not all of the men inside her too, saw Death coming for them.

Until the moment the great ship broke under all that strain then in two ragged halves sank swiftly to the bottom and was still. Above, the sea raged on indifferent.

No S.O.S. was sent. Maybe, there wasn't the time. Regardless, those terrible moments ran long, for the men.

Don't think the Edmund Fitzgerald is a quiet, hallowed grave site. We've picked over its bones. Gone trophy hunting, for treasure and for knowledge. That's what we do. Ask most any Native American or any Egyptian about that, next time you see one.

Every November I think of the Fitz and its men. Once, it was the biggest boat on the lake. Today, it's the biggest boat on the bottom of it. Ever may that be so.

My own intimate relationship with Superior has, as of this writing, never turned terribly fraught. I've relished her when peaceful and serene. Have hunkered against the gale in awe when green water from the belly of the lake broke over the so-called breakwall like it wasn't there and from the heavens lightning flashed then the deep wave shattered upon unbroken wilderness and dissipated into tiny shards of ice. All ways, I love Superior.

I think of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the men and the stillness at the bottom of frigid Superior and trust that for them down there, the sea is forever calm.

Godspeed, all sailors.

Our House Divided Still Stands

For now.

It's a weather-worn, creaky assed structure left in the middle of the stinkin' wilderness, leaning upon a determinedly undermined foundation and when the winter wind blows, it's godawful cold.

But it's everything we've got.

American Gothic - along the Underwood Grade

So by all means take a deep, reflective breath.

Last of the Season - 11.07.2018

Then get back the hell back to work. Perpetual maintenance is required, lest the house fails.

Thought you'd earned at least one day off, eh? Well, welcome to the 21st Century and good luck with that. There's no union fighting for your collective benefit, any more.

To catch any kind of a break you'll just have to keep agitating, agitating, agitating.

That's the American Way.

#vote

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

                                                   -H.L. Mencken

Or, if you prefer…

The dogmas of the…past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

                                            - A. Lincoln

It's on you to choose.

Neither ennui nor cynicism nor any excuse whatsoever for inaction will mitigate your responsibility as a human being, no less as an American citizen. Moral vanity doesn't cut it. You can't escape the future except by dying. In the interim, history comes for you.

So vote like it's the 21st century and you know it.

Vote to embrace the future, not relitigate the past.

Vote to Agitate. Agitate. Agitate. Because the fugitive slave Frederick Douglass learned the hard way how to maintain liberty's architecture, and he wasn't wrong.

What's true then is true now. Short of rebellion, there's the vote.

This great American experiment depends on we the people collectively imposing our individual will upon government, at least every two years. When we don't, we've chosen to give the future over to demagogues and schemers. Fearmongers, extremists and the multitude of liars always eager to define and determine for us, who we are.

We already know how that story turns out...

Vote to empower and extend a more perfect union, not to gnaw over its 20th Century bones.

Fellow citizens, we can not escape history, Mr. Lincoln said.

They didn't. You can't. Your children won't.

So vote, dammit. It's the least you can do.

#vote

#vote2018   #2018midterms  #itsmyvote   #election2018   #turnout