Superior Summer - Image Essay

 

#lakesuperior

Walking the Cliff – Ten Years After

 

Onsite at the Cliff Location, temporary signage with a helpful arrow on it read, "You are here."

Except that day ten years ago, at my shoulder these wild roses were a more vibrant, less nostalgic clue as to what might once have existed there, pretty much in the middle of nowhere:

Did that riot begin life tamed? Were those roses regularly pruned by the woman of a house next to that dark pool added to the historic image for our convenience, where the sign says you are?

In other words, stuck at the rude end of history's perennial...

Fact is, the human imprint that still exists at the Cliff Location on the ancient Keweenawan Rift lies beyond all that noise.

It's found on the hill. In the trees. And by all appearances, is made of stone.

I mean, they did name the place Cliff. The town and the people who lived there proved a transient affair.

It's on and in that cliff the real story lies. The kind of narrative that counts and keeps counting, even as it sleeps.

What a world.

Beneath parts of the cliff, remnants of an old world still exist. Please read the how and why of that here.

Noxious chemical properties of the great pile of stamp sands the Cliff Location eventually got buried under retard natural decomposition. Scrape the surface and even wood survives, roughly mummified.

This Cliff resembles some minor tomb lost in blank Egypt. Except these sands don't much shift unless prodded by seekers asking questions not readily answered by obscurity.

In the meantime, a new wilderness eats.

Shining (soft) Light on the Prairie

Meteorological Summer

Considering these last three days we've kissed 90 degrees Fahrenheit, science would seem to have it about right, this time.

Except a week ago when on a soggy morning I went land looking at a local prairie remnant, sustenance for summer's pollinators proved scant.

What I found instead on a soft morning before the rains returned was leftover brown being overwhelmed by spring green.

Resolute green, even...

All manner of green.

Sigh.

Early bees and butterflies are out & about around our garden, where lupine rage in full bloom and the chives are lavender bolted.

Yet out on the remnant just a few days ago, seasonal abundance remained reticent.

Pending.

Impressionistic.

If such a thing can be said about real life.

While walking, I spotted nary a butterfly nor a bee. 1^st of the year mosquitoes however, were abundant.

I'll take that as a sure sign.

Swiss Street Scene

Old World/New World, red state/blue state…

Some powers that be always look the same.

The male gaze:

The old, Old World

Twenty-five years ago, Heather & I had the opportunity to visit Switzerland. We made the most of it.

While there, I pushed a hundred and twenty sheets of 4x5 transparency film through the Linhof and dozens of rolls of 35mm as well, always keeping the Nikon handy.

This week, just a month or so short of a full quarter century later, I finally finished working my way through all the scans I made from that film.

Seems a shame to just let the whole of it slumber on in the dark because it's 'off topic' here. What does that mean these days anyway, in our defiantly discursive new world?

Besides, it's about respecting the work. We're taught we must. So here we are.

Born to the mid 20^th Century, the thing that struck me most about the Old World is that it's really, really old. Seems obvious I know, but we're talking Roman walls.

As in built by actual Romans. That's what some call call 'Biblical times'.

I mean even in 'modern' times, 1677 was smack dab in the middle of King Philip's War on the dispensable folk who were here first and four years prior to William Penn receiving from the King a charter for to create Pennsylvania in his name.

In Chur they built hotels that hosted Kings. And eventually, us.

Saying the United States of America and everything that's gone on to mean wasn't even a gleam in the Enlightenment's eye is rank understatement.

As a true blue separation of church and state kinda guy, I recall being struck that religious iconography was routine on the everyday public square. Previously, I'd seen stuff like this only in werewolf movies and the like.

Today it wouldn't surprise me in Texas.

In any event, this still strikes me as quite the ways to go, just to go to church…

A week after returning home, I got my eyes on the giant pile of finished film. That's when I first felt with justified conviction, I can do this.

Now I'm reminded that despite those peers who scoffed, it really was possible to shoot 4x5 trans in the field at a success rate of better than 2:1, because I absolutely did.

So take that, incredulous swine of my personally distant past…

And hard as it is now to believe, 35mm film was once a pro medium.

Hell, National Geographic made its nut from that stuff for decades on end.

It was only after I learned how much film those guys (they were mostly guys) burnt through to earn a single placement in the magazine that I understood why some pro shooters I knew refused to believe me. Seemed axiomatic to them that I couldn't, I'm sure.

Little did they know how hungry the future is and was, even then.

Waste not want not, right?

Speaking of axioms, when the fastest route to the top of the world proves unpalatable…

…take the train.

I'd hope (but didn't really expect) that today, this view would be much the same:

No such luck. It isn't. I checked.

And to think I used to believe it was only cultures and their construct that collapsed.

In that same vein, it occurs to me that memorials built to our honored dead, no matter how noble the human sacrifice at the time, inevitably end up covered with shit.

All that said, for me the Old World had its charms.

I even got along famously with the natives.

But in the end, it was no place at all like home.

For instance, our tallgrass doesn't also make beer.

And Baroque art was friggin' insane. That is all.

For now.