Milestone

This month my lifelong search for perfect light as represented here topped 500,000 views.

Coinciding with the original Odyssey's anniversary, which is today.

I was at first inclined to ignore the milestone(s). After all, numerically it’s nothing remotely like viral and boasting on distinctly modest achievement’s strictly bush league.

Plus, 15 years isn’t long as the life flies.

Except being as I’m just a nobody plowing obscure territory then spitting select bits into the ether in case some unknown someone somewhere someday finds them, I thought better of it.

I mean 500k and counting’s nothing to sneeze at, considering.

Besides, not acknowledging the milestone would be disrespectful to both my life’s work and its globally virtual audience.

So hello Seychelles & Brazil. France, Vietnam, Germany & Canada, et al.

To mark these twin occasions I’ve decided to reprise a few select posts, for various reasons.

By all means, dig in.

Way back in 1849, the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr gifted us with the lasting aphorism: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

It’s absolutely right proper & just that we continue to honor those mostly common folk whose Promethean labors - too often at the cost of their modest lives - gave us the vaunted Industrial Age.

That profound, world altering transformation is today far eclipsed by our own, chaotically ongoing.

But too often generational memory devolves into nostalgia, a ravaging beast devouring whole truth and eventually, those who willfully embrace it.

That’s no way to honor anything.

The first time I visited Victoria, the place was just barely hanging on. A lone caretaker lived there. If present, he might lead you around. When not, there were only ghosts.

Due to the yeoman efforts of a few devoted locals, ‘Old Victoria’ later became a cherished historic site and it was through those transition years I taught myself how to shoot abandoned architecture in safety.

Here’s to all those past & present who first preserved and now maintain the place. A special shout out to Patty & Lynnette, whom I consider dear friends even given prolonged absence.

King Copper – The Ghosts of Victoria

Earlier this month, someone stole from the cut woodpile that Old Victoria relies on. Seems likely that was some desperate local, knowing they’d not be able to afford a full winter season’s propane and afraid they & theirs might freeze.

A not at all unreasonable fear, given the wretched state of things these days.

Which leads us here…

In 2011, a company named Orvana proposed a mining project situated hard by the Superior shore, within spitting distance of the Presque Isle River, the western border of the Porcupine Mtns. Wilderness.

What could possibly go wrong?

The project was slated to last fourteen years. Fifteen years later and some tens of millions public dollars pissed away down the corporate rathole, there’s still no mine.

Yet many locals continue to angrily advocate for the project its foreign owners, and so much for 'America First'.

It's as if the boom & bust toll of resource extraction isn’t the demon at the root of the entire region’s multigenerational despair.

Happily, there’re those who continue to stand against it, even as Copperwood creeps ever forward toward realization.

In 1905 the Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

To which I dare append misremember, distort or otherwise subvert manifest history to serve their own narrow ends, thus leaving that narrative’s most invaluable lessons wickedly wanting.

King Copper – Nonesuch (Revisited & Revised)

Speaking of folk perennially lying to themselves…

In 1887 British historian Lord Acton wrote: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Given his nation was the province of Kings, he’d know.

As should we in the supposed ‘land of the free’, nearly a century & a half later.

But, alas.

On a distinctly more positive note…

When I first visited the Kingston Plains it was strictly on the fly, early during a dry spring, the light was harsh and that’s unkind to traditional film. Yet somehow that post continues to rank in the top five, currently #1

Whereas my return trip a few years later was carefully planned, perfectly timed and I deliriously waved the Nikon magic wand all over the place, which gifted me with the single finest working morning of my life.

Yet for reasons unknown the later entry - superior in every way - languishes.

Here’s hoping this corrects that:

The Kingston Plains Revisited – In Perfect Light

Then because the Presque Isle River is far & away my most beloved place in the whole wide world, I must pay my respects.

First, this tale recounts that exuberantly youthful night when Heather & I might rightfully have died, then come morning a bereft momma bear did instead.

The Presque Isle River, Pt. 2 The Bear Story

Then the image below is to honor the last large format film I ever shot.

I believed that afternoon it’d be the end of all this. Knew it, right down to the bones.

Of course life proved me wrong, as it continues to do.

Lastly, there’s this.

For a year or two, my post on the Ontonagon Boulder ranked high on the Google search engine page. These days, it’s 2^nd tier.

However…

John Voelker is my Upper Peninsula hero.

As a writer, among other things he penned ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ under the name Robert Traver, a mostly true story later turned into a classic film, starring Jimmy Stewart in his place.

Voelker later served as a MI Supreme Court Justice of note. Retired (at least in part) because the job took too much time away from his writing and/or trout fishing. His ‘Trout Magic’ followed by ‘Trout Madness’ remain classics of the genre.

That photo hangs in my office above my desk, the Judge forever reminding me to stay fierce and never ever deceive myself, lest I succumb to arrogance. A self-imposed stake through the heart, leading direct to perdition.

 

Just the same, when one searches for John Voelker’s written opinion on one of literature’s most pompous burnouts and the pitiful ignorance of Ernest Hemingway's legion of hapless acolytes who apparently couldn’t even read a stinkin' map, what you find is me.

Goodness gracious. Both obscure and literary. Can’t beat that shit with a stick, eh?

Hemingway’s Foxy Fib

Proper respects now well & truly paid, next month we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Superior Summer

Way back in the almost sorta kinda good 'ol days…

When a steady chill wind rose up off Superior and threatened to ruin an otherwise splendid northwoods summer vacation, the hapless tourist might well wonder:

“What the hell happened to summer?”

Should they ask that of some wizened local, the answer was always more or less the same.

“Summer, eh?” the old coot might sneer. “Up here that’s just three days, long about the end of July”

Given how much the world's warmed since, that's not true today. Nevermind then.

Typically, annual swarms of biting bugs lay lower sometime in July. They're bugs, it just depends.

After that, northwoods communities all along the really big lake are mostly summer tourist heaven.

At least until the beginning of September.

Because ever longer light and less of it every day tells you the autumn leaf peepers are busy making plans. Mostly, those come prepared for the weather.

Once they depart, locals know full well the gales of November are nigh, with the cold, dark season of isolation close behind.

So the real watchword of Superior summer, then now & forever, is this:

Best get the good stuff while the good stuff gettin’s still good.

Dog Days

Mostly, up close.

And what of the real world do you suppose these great black wasp eyes see?

I’m thinking it’s a whole lot. More than we can imagine, probably.

Dog days were so named during the way back when, to note the star Sirius rising.

When those days also brought flooding rains and relentless heat/humidity, it was the dog star’s doing.

So it’s been, ‘round these parts this year.

Overcast. Sultry. Sodden, especially given the more than occasional deluge.

And us with no heavenly figure to blame save our industrious selves, given the ravages of climate change.

For which the highly specialized and steadily diminishing monarch butterfly is a North American poster child of note.

On that matter we stand collectively as individuals all alone.

For now at least, this August like most any other is the blessed time each year when everybody eats.

From the truly quite small and at distance easily missed…

To the unnervingly large laying down track beside scrap in the night, for all to see come morn.

Did you know bumblebees practice facial recognition, among other skills? Used to be, that kind of thing was a proprietary item that in our arrogance set us apart from common critters and defined us as human.

Well, no more.

In the field, my eyes perceived this as just a visually interesting clutch of milkweed bug eggs in decent light and grabbed off a single shot.

Viewed full screen, I see now they sport legs. So not eggs, exactly.

Or like how these dragonflies you think you see are merely reflections caught upon still water. More akin to ghosts than the real deal, which whizzed back and forth about my head.

Regardless all the riches, every passing dog day shortens as night grows long. Autumn creeps ever closer. Come evening, cicadas typically serenade in raucous chorus.

Full dark, crickets and katydids assume the role. These greet particularly humid nights with notable enthusiasm.

Being nocturnal beasties we rarely if ever see either, except earlier today I spotted this big green fellow seeking refuge in thin shadow from the too bright light of day.

Need, meet opportunity...

Every night it's not otherwise raining, I make a point to sit some time in quiet appreciation of late summer’s sumptuous song.

After all, it’s organically fleeting.

But I fully expect this year’s big-assed funnel spider sharing our porch will thrive to near first frost. That’s also nocturnal. But I know it’s there not just by virtue of its ingenious web.

Because this particular nighttime beast occasionally leaves me a gift…