The Ontonagon Boulder

The first roadside attraction along the south shore of the big lake was the fabled Copper Rock of Lake Superior, later rechristened the Ontonagon Boulder.

White folk heard about the boulder before any actually saw it and after the 1st of us started moseying around the basin, we searched it out. At a time when almost none of us dared traverse much beyond the immediate wild shore, men traveled more than 30 dangerous miles up the Ontonagon River just to marvel at a rock. Then they went back the way they came.

Don't go looking for the boulder today. It isn't there. Neither is the place it was found. And where the Ontonagon Boulder is today, you can't see it.

*

The boulder is a piece of mass copper, current weight 3,708 pounds. We've extracted and melted down far larger hunks of copper from Michigan's Copper Country, but the Ontonagon Boulder once resisted fire and became world famous.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

We figure glaciers left it along what would later be the Ontonagon River's low water edge at a nearly inaccessible stretch of fast water woven through steep rock, where few men ever went.

In 1765, Alexander Henry became the first white man to record seeing the boulder. He broke off a hundred pound souvenir and went on his way. He returned in 1771 on the strength of that souvenir and under warrant of the Duke of Gloucester to make the trip profitable. It wasn't, so Henry later declared Superior's now famously abundant supply of copper ...can never be profitably sought..."

The entire area went over from Britain to America after the War of 1812.

In 1820, Michigan's Governor Cass set off to explore the south shore of Superior to see what he could see. Expeditions were valuable to both scientific & commercial inquiry. They also intended to gauge the strength and disposition of the Anishinabe people, who stood square in the way of progress.

Securing a guide to lead the expedition to the Copper Rock proved difficult, as the Ojibwa considered the place sacred. Cass prevailed upon Wa-Bish-Kee-Pe-Nas (called White Pigeon) to lead them to the stone, which they thought might be myth or at least couldn't be as represented. Though White Pigeon knew the route, the party inexplicably lost their way and were forced to return to camp.

White Pigeon's people believed agencies of the Manitou that protected the rock had shut the way.

The expedition eventually reached the boulder, which proved disappointing when compared to legend and lore. About it, Henry Schoolcraft wrote:

 ...the quantity may...have been much diminished since its first discovery, and the marks of chisels and axes upon it, with the broken tools lying around, prove that portions have been cut off and carried away.

Then the Cass Expedition did their best to destroy the thing.

Thirty cords of wood were cut and set ablaze around the Copper Rock. With the fire at its height they threw cold water over it, hoping the boulder would fracture. It didn't. When they tried to cut pieces off, their chisels broke. The Cass Expedition left the thing relatively intact, though four or five feet removed from where they'd found it.

The nature of this fabled rock was at last confirmed. When Schoolcraft (who rarely let truth get in the way of a good story) published his sketch of the Boulder, its fame only grew. The buzzard in the tree is a nice touch, considering...

Image courtesy of the Philip J. Kucera collection

In 1826 at Fond du Lac Superior (near present day Duluth), White Pigeon showed up at the door of Colonel Thomas McKenney, head of the nascent Bureau of Indian Affairs. According to the Colonel, the Indian looked ...as if he had been deserted by every friend he ever had.

That'd be because after White Pigeon's abortive attempt to lead Cass to the Copper Rock of Lake Superior, his tribe shunned him. Again, from McKinney:

The game of the forest avoided him; his weapons failed to perform their fatal office; and the conviction became settled that he was a doomed man. Deserted by his tribe, and satisfied in his own mind that his good spirit had forsaken him, he wandered about the forest a disconsolate wretch, deriving a miserable subsistence from the roots and wild fruit of that sterile region. 

Moved by this Indian's plight, the Commissioners gathered at Fond du Lac decided to restore his pride.

They supplied him with good words and gifts and an Indian peace medal, which was often highly prized. White Pigeon's likeness later made it into McKenney's notable and notably troubled "History of the Indian Tribes of North America", illustrated primarily by Charles King.

And that's how the image of Wa-Bish-Kee-Pe-Nas today hangs on my wall, forlorn countenance forever intact:

A Detroit merchant got wind of the boulder and determined to own it. He thought a man might even get rich, charging folk to see it. For sixteen years Julius Eldred made himself a plan. Then in 1841, at the cusp of Michigan's Copper Boom, he sprang to action.

Paying the local Ojibwa $45 down with $150 promised on account, Eldred set off to claim the Copper Rock of Lake Superior. He failed. Twice, over two years. Managed to get the thing up on skids, so there's that.

Eldred returned to Detroit to refine the plan. Meanwhile, across the Copper Country Treaties were being signed and Houghton blew up La Roche Verte. The rush was on.

The indomitable Julius Eldred traveled back to Superior in 1843, this time with a Mineral Agency permit and the makings for a portable railroad. But when Eldred reached his claim, he found the Secretary of War had issued a mining permit for it to interlopers from Wisconsin. Undeterred, he bought the rock again, this time for $1,365.

The river was too wild to float the rock out. It took Eldred and his crew of 21 men a week just to muscle it up the nearest cliff. There they built a railroad powered by men with capstan & chain. They moved the boulder along it; disassembling track behind, reassembling in front. It's described in breathless, likely accurate prose issued by the U.S. National Museum in 1895:

For four miles and a half, over hills 600 feet high, through valleys and deep ravines; through thick forests where the path had to be cut; through tangled underbrush, the home of pestiferous mosquitoes, this railway was laid and the copper boulder was transported; and when at last the rock was lowered to the main stream, nature smiled on the labors of the workmen by sending a freshet to carry their heavily laden boat over the lower rapids and down to the lake.

Almost enough to think Julius Eldred's luck had turned.

At Superior there awaited an order from the Secretary of War to confiscate the rock, declaring Eldred had no right to it. While offering to compensate him to the tune of no more than 700 bucks just the same. Eldred was in for $1,400 and change. Not to mention the crew of men. And the railroad. And eighteen or so years.

Ever beneficent, the U.S. Government allowed Julius Eldred to display the hunk of copper he'd won for them. He did that in Detroit during October of 1843, charging .25 cents a head. Michigan's Senator Woodbridge called the thing "a splendid specimen of the mineral wealth of the Far West" and Henry Schoolcraft visited the rock he'd first tried to destroy some 23 years before. I wonder if Eldred comped him the quarter...

Then the Feds decided that was enough of that and less than a month in, laid permanent claim to the Copper Rock of Lake Superior.

In 1847 Congress authorized the Secretary of War to settle the matter and Julius Eldred received $5,664.98 for his troubles.

The Ontonagon Boulder sat in the yard of the Quartermaster's Bureau of the War Department for 12 years. Spent the next two or so at the Patent Office then was transferred over to the National Museum, later rechristened the Smithsonian Institution.

Which is where it's not on display today.

*

When the Victoria Dam opened in 1931, the wild stretch of Ontonagon River cut through forbidding canyons that birthed a legend became a placid reservoir. Today it funnels electricity out from the wilderness to points beyond.

Beneath that reservoir is the sacred place of the Copper Rock of Lake Superior, sans rock

Periodically, someone else lays claim to the thing. The good citizens of Ontonagon would sure like to have it. No less so, now that the mill's gone.

In 1991, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community petitioned the Smithsonian for repatriation of the big hunk of copper that once belonged to Anishinabe, if ever it belonged to anybody. Their claim was deemed insufficient.

In deciding the issue, the Smithsonian leaned heavy on the treaties of 1826 & 1842, in which the Ojibwa ceded all mineral rights over to white folk.

And on the $45 dollars that in 1841 Julius Eldred paid to an Ojibwa "head man" for the pleasure of destroying their Manitou.

Thus keeping the Ontonagon Boulder safe from the designs of men...

King Copper -- In the Beginning

The reigning mystery of the Superior region is the 'Copper Culture', of late renamed the Copper Complex and appropriately so, considering.

Perhaps 7,000 years ago (at any rate somewhere between 4,000 & 17,000 give or take), unique geologic circumstance combined with human ingenuity and led to the use of copper that in select places around the Superior Basin is easily found.

Image courtesy of the Philip J. Kucera Collection

It's quite the tale. World famous. Even infamous, depending. A subject of fierce debate in academic/extra-academic circles.

 

Small wonder too, 'cause this necessarily speculative narrative wanders from high science to myth and from established fact to wholesale presumption. There're stops along the way at DNA analysis, mineralogy, geology, native spirituality and collective memory. With outright fraud, complex mathematical formulae, skeletons of giants, academic indignation, whole flotillas of Phoenicians, Vikings and more. Even Edgar Cayce makes a cameo in this story.

Aliens too, though we'll not dig that deep.

The Copper Complex narrative turns primarily on unrelieved ignorance and is laced through with outsized characters carried along by profound cultural bias of the sort that doesn't readily wash, no matter how we apply science to the stain.

Reputations are destroyed, remade and destroyed again, over this.

That's because the Copper Complex story volunteers no definitive conclusion. Even the most rigorous of us and among those the academicians who insist the mystery's mostly dispelled, own to that.

So we do what we do as a people. We did it when we were a copper people and we do it still today -- we fill in the blanks of our story. As best we can with science or reasonable speculation and what's left we fill with invention. Then everything gets mixed all together and we go with it.

The authentic narrative of the Copper Complex people is unknowable to us as all what's left of them is a cache of hand fashioned stuff, a handful of holes in the ground, a cemetery or two and trash, like always with us.

But no oral history. No memory at all. No records to pour over, no diaries to dissect. Not even any blogs.

And because that's true, for so long as we remain a people curious about ourselves, we'll gnaw over this incomplete story of folk who once thrived on Superior's wild edges and for a time gleaned from the earth its copper, leaving their mark for us to ponder.

Even as our own more considerable mark upon the place is inexorably wiped away by much the same magnitude of landscape that obscures our Copper harvesting cousins.

*

What's true is that in a time so distant it remains shrouded by antiquity, over a period of perhaps 7,000 years people of Superior harvested a not inconsiderable amount of copper.

We know this because they left behind a slender record of their work; stone tools, copper implements and pits in the earth from where copper was both worked & removed. It's atop these pits that many of our most famous copper mines were later dug and when the historic copper boom came to America, it was a prehistoric people who'd led the way.

The existence of ancient copper mining came to the attention of commerce in 1847, at a site just up the hill from present day Rockland Mi. At the bottom of a trough and beneath the roots of a nearly 400 year old hemlock tree, an agent of the Minesota Mining Company discovered a detached mass of copper said to weigh nearly six tons. Beneath that he found construct in the form of wooden skids that raised the mass of copper several feet from the ground. The copper itself had long ago been worked smooth.

On that spot the Minesota Mining Company promptly sank Shaft #1.

Immediately and all around the Copper Country, we dug mines where once an ancient people worked. Speculators digging for dollars paid little mind to history and we can't know what evidence was destroyed during decades of building great mines atop much smaller, archaeologically significant sites. But what there was of it disappeared right quick.

Local Ojibwa of the 1800's didn't actively mine copper and whether through faded collective memory or reluctance to reveal to white folk the secrets of a Manitou and thus facilitate it's removal, by & large they kept their mouths shut when pressed on the subject.

So we decided the mysterious miners couldn't have been the Ojibwa, not like white folk ever forgot the secret of concrete for better than 1,300 years or anything...

Someone  mined copper before we did. We damned sure knew who it wasn't, so we filled in that blank with an "unknown people" who then had to have been white folk or descendants thereof, simply stood to reason.

And other mysterious things were found around the Basin too, some leading in a rough trail blazed all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Piles of stone put with apparent purpose. Strange markings on rock. The occasional coin. Indians with blue eyes & light complexion. Stories of long ago "fair-haired marine men".

You know, like Phoenicians. Or better yet, Vikings. Or, added to the narrative much later but better than anything always, aliens. Atlantis. The whole nine yards.

What's true is that Superior copper sports a unique mineralogical signature. Properly tested, we know it when we find it, even when we find it far away. The people of the Copper Complex apparently traded on their copper. We've found it in 'bars' suitable for transport and considering the shells and other things not of Superior that've been catalogued at Copper Complex sites, it's likely that Superior copper made its way along trading routes that ran through Aztalan or Cahokia and from there across the continent.

Perhaps even so far away as the British Isles, where a farmer is said to have retrieved a piece of Superior copper from an archaeological site he discovered while digging in his field and there 'ya have it, we're back to Vikings.

For all of that, the most gnawed bone of contention in all this is the unknown amount of copper removed from whatever number of pits by however many people over no one quite knows for sure how long a time. Answer that and missing, critical chapters of the narrative are laid plain...

Except it sure seems to me that every number we plug into the equation is "x", for unknown. Helluva an equation that is, in a region gone archaeologically ravaged during the 100 years or so of King Copper's latest reign over an industrious people recently gone industrial scale.

And as far as I can tell there exists no comprehensive inventory made of Copper Complex sites that do still survive more or less intact. Which means all we can do is fill in the blanks.

Of this significant effort by people to remove copper from the ground and leveled over a very long time, we've a relatively small pile of relics left to show for it. Folk ask: "Where'd all that copper go?" and it'd seem rightly so.

But who the hell knows? Maybe aliens needed it, to get back to their home in the great northern sky. Via Atlantis.

Lake Superior @ Washburn Wi, from 120mm transparency

We don't remember what song copper sang to the people of the Copper Complex. It's echoes are lost along hard rock outcroppings hidden by thick woods, or played out across big water. It'd be a mistake to measure the meaning & uses of copper to these unknowable people by anything like our own story, especially considering how 19th Century industrial designs on the real world went on to define us, today.

Nor can we take these people's measure by the long ago and far away but much better remembered so vaguely more familiar stranger from across the sea, whose own historically recorded call to King Copper's throne began when man in the ancient world first rose out of the Stone Age to shape metal for his use.

Across the Middle East, Africa & Europe, that advancement set us on our path to modern civilization and is distinctly a horse of a different color, as we used to say. Regardless, it remains the oft-told story many of us are most comfortable drawing from to fill in the blanks, even for that part of the human narrative where civilization as we care to call it never quite cared to happen.

What's true is that this mystery story of human history lost does have a verifiable conclusion, though it leaves our penchant for easy reduction begging:

If we accept what we can't know and put aside our need for invention, what the Copper Complex story tells us is that many thousands of years ago, Superior was very much a world apart.

And remains so even today.

Notes From the Field...

Woodspur School, February 2012

Having now gone some 20 months without one, I'd like to say my absence from these parts during the next few weeks is me scoring a much needed vacation, but it won't be exactly that.

Yeah, I intend to take a day off here & there. But on a project like this there's much needs be done apart from making the blog, which in itself has proved quite the thing. For instance:

I scan 4x5 film on a Scitex scanner that in its day was commercial grade imaging gear. Now I fear for any possible repair of what's essentially obsolete equipment and have put off using it until I could scan the large format film in just a few sessions. That's why most of the 'Selected Fieldwork' is from 120mm. 

It's time for me to work on what I love best. Should the scanner crap out in the bargain, so be it.

While 30 years as a commercial photo tech has served me admirably in regards to managing workflow under deadline, with so much time spent on the road some things fell by the wayside. The 'Resource' list is woeful out of date. And I've a bibliography to compile. Literature on the Lake Superior Basin is rich and so diverse it runs the gamut between folk tales and unique geological science. I've tapped a lot of it, to make this blog. You should have access to that source material.

Apart from three pieces for the Penokee show, it's been more than a year since I've printed anything. Not any of the Images of the Month. Not any of the knee buckling stuff shot while sidetracked in Utah. Not rivers not lakes not fog shrouded mornings not abandoned building or manmade deserts, deserted barns, fallen leaves, not big sea shining water. Not a single print struck to date, of the best work of my life.

Not this, which will take a number of hours and the better part of my printmaking skill to print to within an inch of its life, but which afterwards promises to be positively luminous...

Ontonagon County, October 2012

And when I look to the list of subjects I've yet to cover here, it fairly bursts with items requiring research while planted at the computer, not in a car hurtling through dim hours along two-lane blacktop, chasing the promise of light. If I don't work ahead on the writing, deadlines fail.

So I'll be absent from here for a bit and'll try not to worry overmuch that a blog gone even temporarily fallow is a blog feared dead. Won't be the case. Trust me, I'm just gettin' a 2nd wind and will pop back up here on Thursday, January 10th.

*

One thing already accomplished is that all 15 Images of the Month are now available on a single page, thanks to my invaluable webmistress and creative consultant Tina Leto.

It's bad enough to view film images on a screen. It's worse to view them small. These aren't so small. By all means, please wander on over to the left hand sidebar, click the gateway image & have a look. Window shopping's encouraged.

Speaking of shopping, here're a trio of things you can still get delivered in time to fill out your stocking, hung by the chimney with care...

During 26,000 miles on the road and uncounted nights spent in motel rooms or out under the stars, I was happily accompanied by a great variety of music. These three selections are by substantive artists all and for different reasons, each sustained me throughout. I've hotlinked, for your purchasing convenience:

Driving through mining country or to and from old mine sites, I relied heavily on Kathy Mattea's superb album, "Coal". Sure, I'd have preferred something more specific to the region, but no comparable songbook for copper and iron mining exists. And the almost mythical narrative of our labors to extract coal from the ground for to build America closely parallels that of copper and iron mining from the Superior Basin, as is demonstrated here.

*

Spending so much time in Ceded Territory and considering the history of the region, Neil Young's work on the Jim Jarmusch film 'Dead Man' got heavy airplay while on the road. If you know and love this film as I do, you can probably guess which notable phrase from it kept popping back to mind, as we explored the complex legacy of the still nettlesome relationship between white folk and their Native neighbors.

The score from 'Dead Man' contains some of Young's most incendiary work, especially as captured through this extended solo:

Finally, all too often I rolled back into some motel room already well into the night, knowing that there'd be a wakeup in full dark just a few hours hence. It was essential that I fall asleep quickly and sleep well once I did. Many nights, I'd douse the lights to Arvo Pärt's magnificent Kanon Pokajanen. Most of those nights I never made it past 'Ode 1', when the exquisite, almost painfully beautiful call & response laid me softly down and the remainder of the first disc played on to inform my dreams:

*

Here's where I ought wish you all the 'best of the season'.

But I don't believe for a moment, not even a little, that any wish for "peace on earth, goodwill towards men" can be consigned to a specific season and that the somewhat more gracious approach to each other hoped for during this time of year should ever be accepted as being in any way exceptional.

Compassion isn't a gift to be given, received or withheld. It can't be bought or sold. It's not parceled out according to merit.

Compassion is instead the breath of life well lived.

As I consider all that we've learned over the last months, this season of supposed grace and the events of the last few days, I wish for you what I tell all fellow travelers met along the road of discovery:

Travel safe.

The Annala Round Barn

Sometimes, you just have to get lucky.

Maybe 30 years ago, I went with my friend Will to visit the Annala Barn in Iron County WI. Took a quick tour and that was that.

Wanting to properly work the place, as the years passed I'd regularly drive down that way hoping to find someone home so I might secure the permission necessary to do real work. Each time, the place stood empty behind a locked gate. 

Eventually, the property fell into disrepair. I heard rumors of vandalism and feared that the barn would fall to ruin or be burnt before ever I got to work it. That's happened before.

When this project began, the Annala Round Barn stood second on my list of unique architectural sites I'd determined to finally capture. Last chance, and all.

During the fieldwork of October 2011, I again took the drive into Iron County. This time the gate was open, with a car parked in front of the house.

Turns out the owner was just getting ready to leave. He greeted me warmly and after I explained what I wanted he gave me a tour of the place, including the sumptuous restoration he and his wife are doing on the interior of the house.

Then he kindly gave me carte' blanch to work the site during the course of my project, through the passing of the seasons and in the best light I could manage.

Timing is everything.

From a 4x5 Transparency

Early last spring while shooting the breeze with folk at the Berry Patch in Copper Harbor, I mentioned that my Uncle John had once owned a farm on the Gogebic Range. When asked what kind of farmer John was, I reached for the Yooper's stock answer and six voices replied in unison with mine: "A rock farmer!"

In 1902, the Annalas were among the first five families to settle the rural reaches beyond bustling Hurley WI. Matthew Annala was a Finnish carpenter and stone mason by trade, a farmer and (eventually) father to 12 children, insert joke about long northern winters here.

Back then, round barns were promoted as the most efficient means of working a dairy herd, with feed being stored in the middle of the space and cows spread out around it rather than in rows.

Matthew Annala considered this, looked out upon his field of glacial rock, decided to become a dairy farmer and in 1917 put his better skills to work. It took five years of labor to construct the Annala Barn.

Round barns never caught on, in part because they proved difficult to expand to accommodate growing herds. Few remain in America, with round barns made of stone being exceptionally rare. I know of only one other in the nation.

In 1979, Matthew Annala's barn earned a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Here're a few paragraphs culled from that successful petition:

"The Annala Round Barn and Milkhouse...is significant for its design, its excellence in craftsmanship, and its associations with the area's early Finnish settlement and with private dairy farming in Iron County."

Like most of the Finnish immigrants who came to northern Wisconsin between 1890 and 1910, Annala settled there with the goal of farming the cutover stump left from logging days... Early on he discovered that the cutover lands were unsuitable for agriculture since the growing season was too short, the soil was thick with red clay and the fields were littered with glacial boulders. Thus, Annala, like others, switched his attentions to dairy farming.

Annala had taken a farm tour with Gogebic County Michigan farmers to explore alternative farming techniques...Whatever his influences, Annala was fearful of the destructive power of tornados...With the assistance of his neighbors and a few of his sons, he constructed the 24-inch thick stone walls, while using little mortar but relying instead on the mason's skill in fitting the multi-colored rubble together. This process allowed the walls to be raised in a free-standing manner, as the stones were carefully selected for tight binding. The stonework was excellently fitted to resist water, wind and weather and allows a full appreciation of the various colors, shapes and textures of the stone."

The Annalas delivered milk to the region at least through WWII. His barn continued as a dairy barn until 1973, when the property was first sold.

*

I'm grateful to the property's current owners, not merely for the favor of access but because they realize the importance of what they own and are taking the necessary steps to preserve it.

So the sturdy round barn built long ago of fieldstone by a Finnish craftsman, his neighbors and sons might well stand for another century as testament to hard work, ingenuity & craftsmanship.

And to the willingness of rock farmers everywhere, determined all the same to overcome natural obstacles laid down by nature.

In this case, that'd include tornados too...

From 4x5 transparency

From 4x5 transparency

These images of the interior are all digital capture from the Toy Canon, as I've not yet scanned the film...

Paddling the River of Memory

A few years ago, I returned alone to that stretch of river where Heather & I long ago shared our greatest youthful adventure. This essay is what I came back with. Call it a coda, written 30 years after the music ended.

Should you like, you can read about the original adventure here & here.

No warranty given or implied that it'll help you any with this...

Presque Isle

Autumn is full upon the ground.

Burnished bronze through brilliant gold are fallen. The world breathes ragged at the edges, cut by the wind. Season and spirit are unbound. Resonance withers and what remains stinks of nostalgia.

Repelled by the scent of decay, whisperers in the woods are silent; entreaties saved for ears more fresh with inclination to listen. Water over rock murmurs in muted voice. With winter just beyond a fast dimming horizon, effort lent song now would prove ill spent later, when darkness runs long and flow goes cold. Only the wind boasts full voice, chilled even from the west and never silent. It roars, subsides, draws deep and rising fresh throws a thin veil of grey over an otherwise radiant afternoon.

The sun dims in acknowledgement. Long shadows mark the land, no matter midday.

Buzzards ride updrafts, alert to failed spirit. They crane on the fly and peer straight through thinned forest, down to the moist maze of color at its floor. There nothing stirs save yellow death upon the breeze. Great black birds with dried blood heads peel off on a gust, soar sideways to the south and are off to richer fields. In a moment, they're not even specks against the sky.

That's not easy to do, when one hasn't wings.

Once, we knew how to fly. Or thought so anyway and the two are not so far apart as to make for critical distance.

We drew full the nuances of autumn and soared upon its spirit. Owners of time, we pleased to call Death arbitrary. Then the future was whole with the past, Janus-faced and vibrant. Awareness made us weightless and at liberty to soar. Should a salamander live in a fire pit, the great owl stand guard at the gate and otters disdain foolishness with gruff rebuke, we knew the way those signs pointed. Or told ourselves we did, which is all the same.

And in a moment, we weren't even specks against the sky.

History outweighs promise. The ground is nearer than ever. Maybe time demands that, prerequisite to intimate relation with the Earth. Flight is made the province of dreams -- lest memory invite that acid of old age and slayer of spirit no matter the age, regret.

Autumn is full upon the river.

Slow black water assumes a semblance of day as a mask for a heart run cold. Wind abated, reflection is a real as real can be, but with heaven overturned. Only the faintest ripple betrays a canoe sliding across a liquid sky. Clouds part before the bow, pass on in silent moment then with a visible shiver reform behind. Shining blue pierces dark current. Little fish seek precious warmth in shafts of light, unmindful of exposure. Now and then, slender green tendrils dance in bunches through the sky, waving with revealed rhythm.

At its center, the world meets upon itself. Distinctions of perspective are healed. Stones hover, weightless. Grasses weave in every direction. Forest rises from forest, reaching clouds above and below. The wind points nowhere and everywhere, no compass need apply.

A great heron rises from the river and takes a wide, slow arc across two skies before coming to rest again downstream. Somewhere unseen, but near to where recall resides.

Memory is writ so large that sometimes actuality disdains to contain it. A remembered torrent is a trickle, distance becomes squeezed and youthful courage long tamped down by the weight of perspective turns tremulous.

It's not that memory lies. In its time the moment was true and so remains. There the dead thing was, life reduced to muck and ooze. And here is the spot where determination forced decision and two spirits joined forever in lifelong pursuit, mostly up to the task. The woods were thick, the trail obscure and blazed with fortitude as darkness fell. Thus is narrative created.

Memory is a stain indissoluble. And if the size of it doesn't fit the present, it's only that history has grown so large as to make the past seem small.

The day turns late. It's no trouble to move upstream. Only occasionally does facing current urge to the side and course correction is easily achieved with a bit of will accompanied by a gentle push. A pair of tiny ducks lead the way. Their delicate, duplicate forms effortlessly maintain safe distance.

An otter appears. Its smooth fur throws river on the rise.

The injury of time fades. If scolded for daring, convergence would be complete, old acquaintance made fresh, the past resurrected. Instead, the otter is playful and curious. Repeatedly it dips behind the clouds then reappears to make inquiry with a melodic string of delicate chirps and whirs. A slipstream in the sky marks its underwater path.

Then the otter is gone. As happened long ago, in a heartbeat unnoticed, an invitation is withdrawn. Some secret briefly there for the asking is withheld.

Now history augments flight and seasons come undone.

The worlds of otters and of men intersect and memory is rendered irrelevant. The present is a promise that can be forsaken but not broken. Knowledge is no better excuse to deny what's true than is ignorance.

Autumn is full upon me.

The trip upriver is leisurely. Air and water are one. Earth and the heavens are indivisible and firelight streams through all.

Season and place are reflected whole in the richness of moment. All around, schools of tiny fish leap, fall back and leap again like black specks turning together across high sky. A few lingering golden leaves sway brittle in a freshening breeze. The river runs as deep as heaven is high. Winter is at the horizon, with night just beyond.

Steady against the current and with memory tucked safely again into its bed of dreams, flying proves instinctive.

And from this vantage, one can see that the Evening Star will find its proper place upon the river so to be cast by it back to the sky, as once was a midday sun.

Show & Tell -- October/November

Here's a selection of images captured on 120mm film during the final two months of fieldwork. We spent half that time in and around the Porcupine Mountains as Artist in Residence, with a side trip up to the Keweenaw. The rest was on my home turf, on or near the Gogebic Range.

Once again, we've seen autumn change to winter.

I've set this collection to a few minutes culled from near the end of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony #11. When Johnny, Heather & I spent our autumns at Bobcat Lake, this music often floated up from camp then over the water before trailing off into the far woods beyond.

The Symphony is played here by the Houston Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of the inimitable Leopold Stokowski. 

It might seem hard to believe now, but in his prime Stokowski was a controversial cultural superstar of rare standing -- women swooned, men wanted to be him and the culture at large fiercely debated his relative merits, both personal & professional.

He outlived most of his critics.

This is the most evocative rendition of the 11th I've yet heard and it's absolutely appropriate that we close out the fieldwork with it...