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

Earth Day, 2020 - Shining Light on the Prairie

In praise of remnants...

Mid-20^th Century, the city of my birth still featured a few empty lots out near where during our parent's day the street car ended and suburbia, born not so long before us, began.

We called these lots prairies. Grasshoppers lived there.

The quiet presumption this might be the same ground Indians walked was patently false. Instead these lots were the ragged face of abandonment, pending future development.

We couldn't have guessed that between us and native landscape lay a century of brick yards, gravel pits, pickle factories, truck farms and other such. Critical midwives to a city that in short order grew to eat them all, memory of their existence included.

Happily, we'd also ready access to county Forest Preserves. Commonly called the woods.

As in, Of course I didn't ditch church and go to the woods. Why?

Neither were those what we thought. Shot through with invasive species, floodplain re-engineered and oak savanna ravaged, they were indeed woods. But never forest preserves.

The city's namesake river flowing through them reeked. The riparian ribbon along it was perennially mud-caked and grey. It too stank beneath the summer sun. Most everything off trail raged with buckthorn.

Still, for us the place was Wonderland.

Notably, that's where I first met turtles. In the dictionary under "indomitable", there ought to be a picture of a turtle.

An hour's drive outside the city, we later found remnants of authentic tallgrass prairie interspersed with oak savanna and wetlands, everything squeezed between family farms and summer cottages. Red-winged Blackbirds sang only there.

Yet again, little was at it seemed.

Redirected, otherwise restricted and rich in agricultural runoff, my boyhood creek was long corrupted. Year after year, the remaining oak with gnarled skins, widespread crowns and marble-sized babies snug in little caps waiting for rapid fire to birth them, were sacrificed to the housing gods.

After the human population reached recreational mass, one summer they'd the bright idea to poison the local lake and rid it of 'rough fish'. That was a memorable season, when heaps of stinking carp littered the shores and even the remaining farmers refused more free fertilizer, which resulted in uncountable dead fish left rotting under the sun.

This wholesale destruction of life in the lake made no lasting difference to it, we'd not rescinded our standing invitation to the carp. Corralled by the dam that made the lake, out of my crippled creek that kept it filled, the carp simply moved back in.

Tough neighborhood, rough fish.

Take that same hour's drive from the city today and the farms have fallen to development, save those left catering to tourists. Towns and villages that once dotted the way are grown so fat at the waist they run together like a snake swallowing a succession of rats, with little breaks taken for breath in between.

But then...

For the first time in living memory my boyhood creek is more or less restored to its historical meander. Satellite imagery guided the way. Smallmouth Bass and Walleye live in it.

Now the creek runs fairly clear and of its own free will through rediscovered wetlands. There, complex life that until recently could only be imagined thrives on late protected then fiercely encouraged remnants of original, natural world.

Closer in and the county's revered Forest Preserves are being incrementally transformed into a reasonable facsimile of native landscape. Genuine yeoman's work. The long friggin' haul. We'd be thirty years farther in, except ignorance refused to see the native woods for all the foreign trees, then tore its hair and shrieked like hell at first sign of cleansing fire.

Truth is, sometimes to be rid of false notions and bad habits you've just got to get out the torches, gather together with collective purpose, then burn the living hell right out of them. All the way down to the roots.

But don't salt the earth. Never do that.

As it turns out, the earth remembers.

Near what used to be the city's boundary, in my old neighborhood is a singular chunk of greenish space that's pretty much always been 'empty'. At least as close as you'll ever again get to original ground, anywhere around there.

Beneath some of the ground might be bodies, since that's the far reaches of a barely remembered potter's field, subsequently eaten by what the County then called an insane asylum. No coincidence I think, that one followed the other.

A small creek rises from beneath the city.

It trickles over a concave stretch of concrete cut through invasive bull thistle and native Indian Grass, near a small patch of what might someday again be oak savanna. Then the creek disappears back beneath the city.

In the space between, coyotes live.

When first responders race down adjacent streets with sirens wailing, coyotes answer in song.

Across one of those streets, a new High School complex is nearly complete. There's presently no rush to finish. #Covid-19 sweeping the land, kids aren't flocked to fill it.

But in time, they will be. There's little real doubt that then those children and their teachers will adopt this hardscrabble remnant at their doorstep and -- generation upon generation -- make the place as authentic as imagination coupled to knowledge and fueled by the fire of overarching purpose can manage.

In my youth, I imagined little pieces of remaining real world to be what they aren't. Then knowledge disabused me of innocence and though I still took them for sacred, the remnants were also inescapable markers along our long trail of cumulative error.

Now hurtling toward my dotage, I've come to recognize these prairie remnants as wholly appropriate to our times.

Often terribly fraught yet frequently glorious, they're in fact articles of good and enduring faith, these days increasingly well met.

#earthday #savetheplanet

The Howling Sky

Raven pushes hard against brutal grey wind. The wind pushes back, harder.

Fleet winged specter black against the sky, raven gains short distance for each longer distance the sky hurls him looping backward, off the direct path some say Corvidae fly. Sky and sky-rider's rhythms in muscular opposition, the determined bird makes progress.

Circuitous for sure. Daunting, even. Progress nonetheless.

Thrown down near a nascent spring treetop, raven alights on its spindly fingers. Those wave wildly back and forth as if trying to shed him. Raven hangs tight and catches his breath.

A raucous call goes out. It rides high and wide or is unheard, on the will of the wind. No answer comes. Raven launches off, again against a howling sky. Maybe the answer just went unheard by me.

When day ends, raven won't be where he'd intended at the start. The sky determined otherwise.

Closer must do. And it will.

1st Day of Spring, 2020

In the time of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Robins sing in predawn chorus. Goldfinches have returned. Drenched by midday rain, a Mourning Dove coos. I'm reminded that last summer, a pair of doves brought their babies for safe haven to our garden.

The garden should be even more welcoming this year. Perhaps having learned the lesson, those babies will bring their babies here for safe haven as well.

Meanwhile, the primrose declares - My time is now.

The raucous voice of Sandhill Cranes riding north cuts chill grey air like a scythe. Two mornings in a row, a pair of male cardinals kept close company with a female while she picked the place over and mostly ignored them.

Some folk take spring as a sign of hope. I respectfully disagree.

Hope is just dreaming. For instance, all winter long I hoped the sublime Prairie Smoke I planted last summer took root over winter. But just this morning, I learned for a fact it did.

Spring is perennial promise made manifest. That's way better than hope.

Tomorrow when temperatures plummet on a cold front roaring down from the north, provided the sun shines bright through crisp clean air, the crocuses will nonetheless burst blue.

The little buggers below (hyacinth, I think) fully understand they must yet wait their turn. Also, that it will come. So they bide time.

The real world knows exactly what time it is. Now, perhaps we know too.

Because this particular spring the Earth reminds us of our proper place upon it. Beyond the immediate worry and fear, we must understand that maybe next time, real life will shrug us off altogether and good riddance, too.

People like to say Life goes on and they're right, far as that goes. Doesn't mean it'll include us, though.

In the northern hemisphere the vernal equinox occurs just this side of midnight tonight. First time in 124 years that's happened today, not tomorrow. They say a spring storm will usher it in.

Meanwhile, the lupine seeds purloined two years ago from along the Presque Isle near where the river feeds the big lake bring manifest promise to my little slice of prairie. Now there's but to see if they stay cerulean, or choose on their own to adopt a different shade.

Whether or not I make it up to Superior this spring as planned, I'll be damned grateful to find out either way...

The Annala Round Barn – An Appreciation

For decades I'd head out along straight line gravel from Ironwood MI just into Wisconsin, then stop alongside the road for to gaze longingly from a distance at one of the United States' last (perhaps the last) fieldstone round barns still standing.

You can read the story of the Annala barn and how I finally came to access that here.

Given free reign, I took full advantage and eventually shot the place every which way, using 4x5 and 120mm transparency. Also with the Toy Canon, to cover my butt. Near the end of the Odyssey, I visited armed with the brand spankin' new Nikon. All I can say is that I'm damned glad I lasted so long.

Digital image capture/processing is made for the likes of the Annala Barn. Those aspects of the structure typically sheathed in shadow stand reasonably revealed. What's luminous in life is done representative justice.

Accompanied by my dear friend Amanda, on a bright sunny day to help close my sojourn, I did my best to translate the place in that moment in time.

So let's take one last look inside, eh?

I'll be forever grateful to the current owner for taking such good, loving care of this priceless legacy property and for allowing me to work it. Also to the far flung Annala clan, for their generosity of spirit. What follows is dedicated to all of them.

May Mathew Annala's sturdy old stone barn shine for generations to come…

Calling All Artists – 2020

This year, the deadline for submissions to the Artist in Residence Program in Michigan's Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park is February 14th.

Run by the Friends of the Porkies organization, I was privileged to take part in that program during October, 2012.

My time at Dan's Cabin didn't just further my creative interests going forward. Those two weeks of comfort in the wilderness continues to inform and enhance me, to this day.

Since then, I've written about the experience a number of times. In so many ways, for me it's the gift that keeps on giving.

You can read about that here:

And here: Home is Where the Heart Is

And here: Creative Conversation

If you want to know more about the Porcupine Mountains, there's this:

The Porcupine Mountains Wilderness, Pt. 1

And this: The Porkies – People & Their Government at Work

Or, you can just take my word for it and apply.

Life is short.

As to the Friends of the Porkies Artist In Residence program at Dan's Cabin in the Porcupine Mountains, the time left to submit your application is short indeed.

Your comfy cabin in the woods awaits you…

Have at it.

Otherwise, you'll never know where the path not taken might've led.