Public Toilet Art, x 3

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During the 1850’s, an exceptionally bright & progressive man purchased remote acreage where 300-year-old oak trees stood. Seasonal wetlands fed those.

There, he raised a family. The man became famous for his devotion to natural sciences & tireless advocacy for public education.

His son went on to be a renowned naturalist. As he was an explorer, the family’s presence at their ancestral home waned over time. Meanwhile, the population encroaching on the old growth oak forest steadily grew.

1929, neighbors of the original family built a fancy prairie style house on the grounds. There, they became authors of note. But eventually, the entire site fell to neglect.

In the 1970’s, a multinational corporation proposed building a massive facility on the site. Trees had already been felled. Bulldozers were poised.

Then the local community rallied around. Public protests were held. The company yielded and the original estate was saved.

These days that once famous corporation is a mere shadow of its former self, while under the watchful eye of devoted citizens, the old growth oak forest and accompanying seasonal wetlands thrive.

The prairie style home serves as a high-end wedding venue. At some point, a public restroom was built to accommodate guests. In that, these finely made tiles appropriately honor the impressionistic past.

Except they’re laid into the floor!

Each and every time I use the facility, I’m struck by how disrespectful that is to the craft it took to make them. You know, considering guy’s propensity to splatter.

Outside the entrance, this colorfully exuberant woman faces the men’s toilet, rather than her own.

I expect she’s overjoyed at never having to swab that floor.

*

Some miles northwest along a river that once served as a canoe trail for indigenous peoples, amidst a marshy Sugar Maple and Burr Oak forest, during the 1920’s rich folk built weekend getaway log cabins so to escape the stinking coal dust choked city that with wealth given power they ruled.

That select group included the son of a steel company magnate, such industry even then transforming the world for both good and ill.

Curiously, these privileged retreats lacked plumbing. Which means one way or the other, they peed in the woods.

When in 1938 word got out that significant adjacent acreage was to be sold, the steel scion bought it. He hired a famous designer to build a ‘gentleman’s farm’ of whitewashed agricultural structures, where he raised Arabian horses.

A true gentleman’s pursuit, if ever there was one.

In 1942 the man added a splendid Greek revival summer home, which his family used until 1972.

Then the place lay more or less dormant until 1984, when a consortium of local residents and environmental interests convinced the county forest preserve district to secure the site's future.

Today, its educational programs carry national resonance.

The art in the visitor center’s public toilets doesn’t honor the past. Rather, with manifest skill they accurately represent denizens of land, water and air that were once native to it and these days, are once again.

Practicality leading to simple common respect, this fine crafted art is placed well above waist high on the walls. Well beyond even the most wayward man’s casual reach.

*

Finally…

Starting long about the end of the last ice age and lasting until the industrial age subsumed everything around it, along a different indigenous river route a flood prone forest of remarkable richness and diversity thrived.

By the time those woods became my favorite childhood haunt, ravaging Buckthorn strangled it near to death and the river was carpeted by bloodworms.

Boys being boys, we peed wherever and whenever at will. Much like the landed gentry in days of yore.

Over the last 50 years, prodigious restorative efforts have taken hold.

When this past spring these woods flooded, I caught a semblance of forest primaeval that hadn’t existed since generations before I was born.

A place where life then death and life again perennially sustains itself.

I figured then that if there’s any modern art to be found onsite, that’s it.

Except at today’s busy trailhead, there’s sometimes a portable toilet provided for public convenience. Unisex, by design. Tiny. Often filthy. I try very hard to avoid these.

But when you gotta go, you gotta go and that morning, I surely did.

Inside, vivid yellow strokes slashed against a dark background presented a symbolically direct, yet ultimately ineffectual visual message. Because I can't imagine any modern, gilded age billionaire need ever use a public porta potty.

And preaching to the already converted is too often just like pissing in the wind.

Tracking the 1st Signs of Autumn

Time flies, it’s commonly said.

Probably that’s because a human life, though often glorious, naturally runs short.

I prefer to think time counts and keeps counting, with or without us.

That way, magnificent existence isn’t falsely reduced just to suit puny human arrogance.

Bypassing the ungodly mess our collective ego has made of a natural world that'd perennially sustain us, had we given it even half the chance.

Regardless, the land and everything else dependent upon it knows exactly what time it is.

As each day shrinks, shadows deepen.

What typically goes to edge season seed, does.

Including me, apparently.

But that’s a different story, at this moment neither here nor there.

Because last night, our Bush Katydid sang through 1st light of dawn beneath a rising crescent moon. While as I write this, White Sulphur butterflies dance upward together toward a brilliant sun.

Soon enough, the 1^st hard frost will come. It’s inevitable.

After that, there’ll be no more room for doubt.

No matter how unseasonably pleasant the weather might prove today.

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.