Lake Superior Day, 2020 - A Circle Tour

Text and Images by Philip J. Kucera, except as noted.

The First People named the lake Kitchi-gummi, or Great Water. In 1620 - the same year pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock - when arriving at what's today called Sault Ste. Marie, the Jesuit missionary Etienne Brûlé dubbed the inland sea beyond the Soo rapids Supérieur. The Upper Lake.

Later, English landlords as they're wont to do, simplified that to Superior. And so it is.

We northerners pay homage to Lake Superior on the third Sunday of July each year. Personally, I carry a large garbage bag when visiting a beach or two. Superior's shores stay amazingly clean year 'round, thanks to efforts made by hoards of locals and visitors...out of respect.

This year Frank and I, along with some guidance provided by time travelers, invite you on a tour of favorite stops around the big lake. We'll start our trip going clockwise from Sault Ste. Marie. From there in 1659-60, the two French explorers Radisson and Groseilliers were the first to skirt the entire south shore. Along the way they traded with Native inhabitants, European goods for furs.

Translated from Radisson's manuscript: "It was to us like a terrestrial paradise. We went along the coasts, which are most delightful and wondrous, for its Nature that made it so pleasant to the eye, the spirit, and the belly".

In 1721 Pierre Charlevoix cautioned: "when a storm is about to rise, you are advertized of it... two days before, you perceive a gentle murmuring on the surface of the water...the day after, the lake is covered with large waves. But on the third day...the lake becomes all on fire; the ocean in its greatest rage is not more tossed....

A south shore fisherman working out of Black River Harbor once told me, "When you look out there at the lakes' end and you see pimples all across that long line, it's time to head for shore fast, cause a big blow is coming pretty quick."

An English gentleman, Frederick Marryat traveled the south shore in a birchbark canoe in 1837, along with two hunting companions and five crewmen. All were amazed at the wonders of nature.

"We landed at dusk, much fatigued; but the aurora borealis flashed in the heavens, spreading out like a vast plume of ostrich feathers across the sky, every minute changing its beautiful and fanciful forms...we watched it for hours....

From Father Dablon, in the 'Jesuit Relations, 1610-1791': "...extensive fishing is carried on...of a kind of fish found usually only in Lake Superior and Huron...called in the native language Atticameg, and in ours 'whitefish,' because in truth it is very white: and it is most excellent...

Did I mention there are incredible restaurants along the entire lake shore, many of them off the beaten path? Some still serve fresh fish.

Colonel Camille Pisani, journaling Prince Napoleon's tour of Superior, wintered over in 1861-62. "The inhabitants of the region are...as the crew of a ship caught in the ice of the polar seas and forced to hibernate. Their winter is terrible. The temperature often lowers to the freezing point of mercury. The lake is covered with a very thick layer of ice, increased by heavy snowfalls...terrifying storms break the ice crust; the stormy lake piles up the ruins of its prison on the shores...

The Minnesota shore is a nearly unbroken rock wall from Duluth all the way to the Canadian border. Between rising stone and big water, in many places there's just sufficient room for the famous Highway 61 to weave it's way north.  With enough trees to give the surroundings at least a half wild look the entire 150 miles, it's one of the most scenic shoreline drives in the country.

Count two dozen state parks and scenic waysides, with a like number of fishing hamlets along the way. Among those is tiny Hovland, located about a dozen miles short of the Canadian Border, on Chicago (Horseshoe) Bay.

The day before Thanksgiving 1958, young Carl Hammer headed out in his 16' open skiff to pull nets before a major nor'wester struck. The storm arrived early. Worried  his fishing partner hadn't returned, Norwegian born 63-year-old Helmer Aakvik set out in his old wooden skiff to find Carl, but he and his boat were gone. Helmer worked the lake for over 28 hours in gale force winds, 20-24 foot seas and temperatures all the while well below freezing, searching for his friend.

You can listen to the story here.

F. Hutton

There's something to be said about the tenacity of the inhabitants of the Lake Superior Basin.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017, a buoy set in eastern Lake Superior by Northern Michigan University, recorded a storm wave of 28.8 feet in height and hurricane force winds clocking just under 80mph.

Both the day prior and the day after the storm, seas were near calm. What we call a White Squall.

On the Canadian shore, Rossport once supported a large commercial fishery and was a prime source for whitefish. A former Canadian Pacific rail stop, today the scenic town attracts tourists arriving by boat or auto.

Fish tugs still head out from the port, in calm weather and not. Boats working Canadian waters are generally larger than their counterparts in the U.S. Northwest gales have a tremendous reach across the northern half of the lake as they batter the east shore.

Now we're almost back to the Soo, with just one more stop to make.

F. Hutton

On the face of Agawa Rock in Lake Superior Provincial Park, amid dozens of red ocher pictographs, is an image of Mishipeshu, the Great Underwater Panther, the ancient Spirit of Lake Superior. Mishipeshu is Lake Superior. Angered, it will upset a 40 foot birch bark Montreal Canoe in a moment. A proper offering—Kinnikinick (tobacco) perhaps, or a treasured trinket, might smooth 30 foot seas in like time.

And now we've reached the end of the road…

Every day, a visit to Lake Superior is a celebration. This was fun. See you on the lake.

*

Philip Kucera's been my dear friend and mentor for longer than either of us should like to think on. From Phil I've learned more about the Superior Basin and fine art than anyone else, by far. It's my distinct pleasure to have turned over this space to him, for Lake Superior's namesake day.

#lakesuperiorday2020 #lakesuperiorcircletour #lakesuperior

Interdependent Days

Go with a loved one this 4^th of July to a Lake Superior beach and Covid-19 won't find you. This dread virus isn't so novel that it lurks there waiting to kill.

For that you'll need neighbors. Fellow citizens, mostly.

Specifically, you'll need neighbors whose terminal self-regard demands they endanger your life for their convenience. They're also blind to how liberty works. That's a deadly combination.

Certainly, individuals have every right to risk their own lives or even waste them, as they choose. More critical to liberty's cause, no one has any right to risk your life for you. Otherwise, thus do demagogues rise to dictators and democratic republics fall.

The hard case is that politics and plague notwithstanding, the personal liberty angrily claimed by the most recalcitrant among us isn't theirs alone. It belongs to us.

Together we empower and sustain American style liberty. You simply can't hold that ground on your own. Today, anyone still in possession of even half the good sense they were born with knows that in their bones.

The word for acting in total disregard for your neighbors isn't liberty, it's license. Of the fabled Deadly Sins, that's an operative in six of seven and even sloth is basically a libertine's choice.

Ants don't know from license. Intuitively, each ant at its core understands and accepts that continued ant success requires they each pursue collective purpose.

Of course ants aren't an ideal metaphor for humans. Their slavish devotion to royalty alone ruins the notion, as the Declaration of Independence reminds us.

Except humans believe themselves exponentially better in all ways than ants. Right?

If you claim the liberty that's yours as a human being, prove it by being better at living together than ants. Exercise your individual will to pull with the rest of us in the only viable direction left.

Remember - it's life then liberty as recorded in freedom's Holy Writ, after which comes everything else. Only with the first can the second exist, much less we get to chase after happiness in our spare time.

So wear a damned mask. Then maybe you'll still be around to help when we the people once again make something necessarily new out of the old, outdated us.

Choose instead to place your neighbors at risk through your moral vanity and - provided you don't first die of stupidity - in the future you'll be on your own. Because those free people who survive as witness to such aggressively ignorant folly as yours, they'll remember.

Expect a run on sackcloth. There'll be no shortage of ash.

#wearthemask #independenceday #liberty

Summer Solstice 2020

Honeysuckle

Perched between two fierce wind storms, on an early morning the air laid low and soft wet light burst with color. If this spring's taught me anything, it's to take no opportunity for granted. Indeed, grab each one as it comes whizzing by however you might, whenever you can.

No moment ever comes again. As tropical storm Cristobal roared north across the continent, tracking farther west than any storm on record before it, I took the sublime light for everything it offered.

Veronica (Speedwell)

In some parts of the ancient world, on summer solstice folk built bonfires intending to hurl fire toward the sky. They thought that'd encourage the invariably slipping sun to keep burning bright. Of course, what those people believed was hooey.

Summer's tipping point arrives around here this Saturday at 4:43 PM. We call summer solstice "the first day of summer" when in fact, as the world spins the season's all downhill from here. Go figure.

Flox, maybe. Dunno, it grew on its own

Spring 2020 was cool overall and notably wet. Record setting May rains, third year in a row. Sounds like a trend. As midsummer 2020 approaches, in many respects it still doesn't look much like summer.

As yet, honeybees have only the salvia.

Salvia

Bumblebees feasted on all the lupine they could get while the getting' was good. The hyssop that'll sustain them lags behind.

This…

Honeysuckle

…turned into this:

Honeysuckle

But no hummingbirds come. Or if they do they're here then gone, unseen.

On the other hand, our annual crop of fireflies has emerged. They float and crawl all the day around everywhere, awaiting only some magic signal sent on exactly the right warm evening for to dance.

Firefly on Black-eyed Susan

Last night, a few lit for the first time this season. By Saturday, the firefly bacchanal should be in full swing. Neither will these fires persuade the sun not to fade, but I'll be out there watching just the same.

A week ago during Cristobal, even a last lupine held firm. Now, those're all gone to seed.

Lupine

Maybe solstice will bestow abundant riches and after that - for a while at least - everybody eats. We'll see.

From this vantage it seems we reached our tipping point some months ago during the dark of winter, not that anyone noticed. Despite the sun's high point strength, it's still pretty damned dark. Now here we are, on the cusp of yet another appropriated Pagan high holy day.

Many of us alone, working individually together with what we've got, as best we're able. Hoping like hell to get fat before another long, cruel winter sets in.

Hover Fly (or Sweat Bee) on Spiderwort

#summersolstice #midsummer

Show & Tell – A Vintage Photo Album

Photo by H. Hutton

Autumn 1975, Heather & I took our first trip together to the Superior wilderness. Earlier that summer she'd returned from Europe with a 35mm Topcon camera. In the Ottawa national Forest that fall, I snatched it.

Below are my 1^st ever images of architectural/cultural abandonment, taken in 1975 as Heather and I wandered around the forest. The Ottawa's boundaries might be legally distinct, but on the ground they're richly unknowable.

Turns out, the specific interests that later informed my life's photographic work were in play at the start.

Who knew?  Not me. I'd forgotten.

Until determining, even prior to pestilence, that purging and scanning what'd then be left from my once vast catalog of vintage 35mm film was an essential task, way overdue. I mean if you're never gonna use it and don't really care about it, why the hell is stuff still hanging around?

The savage culling was unexpectedly easy, the scanning went as expected and the process of discovery proved occasionally joyous. Now it's done.

I'm almost completely indifferent to family snapshots and probably, our vacation pictures aren't exactly standard issue. Except I've always been exceptionally keen on Heather and sometimes the feeling's mutual, so there's that.

Forty-five years ago, I appropriated Heather's camera in order "to keep my hand in." That's what I said, even to myself.

Already shooting 16mm film with my trusty Bolex, the pedestrian tourist camera with the crappy glass felt like creative surrender. I was ashamed.

Technology being what it is, in hindsight the excuse seems silly. My youthful filmmaking dreams were about to get mortally wounded, when video tape killed the 16mm film industry.

Soon after that, I bought an equally trusty Nikon F, returned the Topcon to Heather and never much looked back. Winter 2020, my digital archive of vintage 35mm film has returned that antique medium to existential value.

For instance, this sore neglected catalog reminds me that sometimes, Lake of the Clouds actually is…

And of the time I raced an electrical storm up that same overlook so to shoot the beast as it roared through the valley and broke upon the precipice, about the highest ground anywhere around. Since we arrived more or less together, all I came away with is this:

A massive fail, considering. On the other hand, I escaped alive. Let's call it a win then, crappy image notwithstanding.

I remember that hauling my sorry ass out in the dark after too little sleep on the first morning in a new place just to see what might be seen can be vastly rewarding. Watching light incrementally throw night off a magnificent world is exactly where one needs to be. The rest of the day can take care of itself.

Our first morning in Copper Harbor:

My dimming perspective on our trek into the roadless McCormick Wilderness is also altered…

…by visual proof that car camping at modest Bobcat Lake just two easy miles in from Marenisco's theoretical civilization could be and frequently was a whole lot tougher than overnighting among the remnants of Cyrus McCormick's camp.

Of course, no man's memory is all peaches and cream.

Now it's fresh in my mind that when wandering off into the woods at what we thought just might be/could be the way to semi-mythical Nonesuch, we'd no earthly clue where we actually were.

Then on a steep hill cloaked in deep wet woods, at the blindingly obscure ruins of a definitely lost civilization, I nicked this souvenir:

Which I've been trying and failing to capture on far better terms nearly every visit since. At this point, 35mm will just have to do.

And it hurts being reminded that Bobcat's byzantine spider kingdom - what I worked at so hard during my final 35mm visit – will just have to wait (hopefully only) another year. Perhaps next spring I'll at last capture and forever hold that wonder in numeric amber. Then I'll not have to try more.

In any event, never let anyone tell you working a gossamer subject that appears and disappears with the light on any soft breeze while you try to keep a canoe steady is easy.

On the brighter side, I've recovered stone cold proof that once when along Superior's northern shore I encountered the incredibly rare Canadian Octopus, red variant. And when I did, it smiled at me.

I've not breathed deep Superior's northwoods wilderness maybe three calendar years of the last forty-five. I didn't consider those good years.

During the Odyssey, I embraced the place better than before and likely, more frequently than ever again. In ways big and small, definable and not, Superior embraced me right back.

What others call vacation, I called opportunity. Through my efforts year after year after year I built both a creative avocation and found the great love affair of my life, 2^nd only to beautiful and effervescent Heather.

It never occurred to me that I'd been making a 'memory book'. As it happens, I was. And it's of inestimable value to me, in part because on the occasion the Presque Isle River hurtling toward Superior is in my mind's eye, the image below is what I see.

Alone among the hundreds of shots I've taken there, this little piece of antique film - blown highlights, murky color tone and indecipherable shadows included - best captures what I feel, when on those slippery rocks. It's like returning home.

I can almost hear the river spirits sing. As ever, they call for me…

Memorial Day

In 2020, the world as one can clearly see that private wealth exists primarily to buy private privilege. The less wealth you have, the fewer privileges you've earned. Up to and including your 'right' to life.

Let all Americans remember that when push came to shove, aggrieved citizens indignantly clutching their 2^nd Amendment weapons of war like those'll save them, have neither the patriotism nor the guts to protect you & yours by wearing a simple cotton mask in public. Today's give me liberty or give me death crowd doesn't know jack about liberty and the death they're inviting isn't merely their own, to which they're entitled. It's yours, too.

Lest we forget…

We the people continue to transfer billions of dollars of our wealth over to multinational corporations to do with as they please. At the same time, venerated 'Main Street' – the regular folk from small businesses to family farms, minimum wage workers to first responders – must fight over scraps.

Many in Congress believe that measly $1,200 they sent you was sufficient to buy our complicity. Come November, we must disabuse them of that notion.

During this pandemic, people of color and other underprivileged citizens die of Covid-19 at a far greater per capita rate than even the most modestly privileged among us. For the same reasons as that, while fighting the worst public health crisis in 100 years, United States medical workers – those citizens currently putting their lives most at risk for rest of us - are being laid off by a healthcare racket designed to profit from perennial illness.

And if you've never wept for Native Americans, take a moment and weep today. What's happening to the Navajo Nation is a national shame that will stain these not so United States until the last.

You know, unless we tell ourselves it didn't really happen. Or that somehow the Navajo brought it on themselves, in which case they deserve it. Fake news, either way.

Lest we forget…

Adam Smith believed Capitalism would liberate a free people "...to feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections…"

John Maynard Keynes wrote: "The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of ignorance which envelope the future."

Little did those two paragons of Capitalism know about it, eh? Though to his credit, Keynes seems to have had a handle on both the ignorant future and the darkness ignorance breeds.

Never forget…

That in the coming months, when the choice facing American voters is relentlessly framed as being between a free market's too often unaffordable freedoms and the satanic evils of Socialism, those who frame it that way don't actually give a shit about you.

They're the ones who just gave away a bunch of your money to big-assed corporations, again. They're the ones who begrudge your family its access to healthcare, meager though that is for far too many.

Never forget…

That "normal" is only ever what we the people collectively decide it should be.

It's all but certain that in the not terribly distant future, a day will come for people of good will the world over to decide what 21^st Century normal should be. We must stand together now, prepared to seize that opportunity when it comes.

Make no mistake: the old normal would rather we die, than see us once & for all exert the liberty that even they say is rightfully ours.

Never forget.

Other Years...

Mid to late May, 2014/2015

Hurricane River

Kingston Plains

Montreal River

Kingston Plains

Hurricane River

Cisco Branch, Ontonagon River