The Gnomes of the Snowlands

Before winters disappears entirely, as it has almost done, here's a little reminder of those long, darker days when spring seems to have decided to skip a year or two. This fellow stands serenely at the foot of the front door of Art and Miranda Davis's place in Copper Harbor (Miranda is my daughter). Art enjoys his gnomes, for some reason I cannot fathom, and there are a number of them inside and outside around their CH cabin. I was so pleased to give him a couple more this past Christmas. I insisted on buying them for him, though Marsha couldn't believe what I was doing as we looked them over in a market in East Lansing. This chap is the Davis's Greeter Gnome, nearly buried in the snow a few months ago, but still holding his post.

Concerts and Language

It's one of those times of year in which there are many school concerts. Drew and Logan were both involved in Okemos's joint-school Spring Concert at the high school recently. Logan is in middle school choir and Drew, in fifth grade, is in first year strings and choir as well. This is a shot of Drew on the risers in the high school auditorium on the night of the big concert. That's him separated from all the kids in this perspective. It was just a chance shot. Being tall, he always stands in the back, so I try to get a shot of him when he's coming on stage. I always enjoy photos like this one, of a crowd of people doing something. I like studying the faces and the gestures of each person and reflecting on how each person experiences a shared event differently. Many stories are being told in this photo, but the stories are almost entirely hidden, as is so much in life -- sometimes even in our own private lives.

Next up we have a shot of Logan on our short trip to the Ohio River and Mammoth Cave National Park over spring break. Logan was sitting in a downtown restaurant in a farm town in central Indiana where we were having burgers for lunch. He's studying his Latin flash cards. Logan loves languages right now and is always working on something to do with learning or even making up languages. Keep up the good work, boy. There is a story or two being told in this photo, too, but they are narrower and more focused stories. Yet there is much in Logan's face to study, and don't we all love to study our children? Marsh and I, when we go out alone, have to work hard to keep from spending all our time alone talking about the kids, as is so common among parents.

Spring Fields

Just before last week's cold snap and snowfalls, which took the shape of that massive blizzard up in Copper Harbor, down here in Okemos the snow had all melted and the fields, though still a bit muddy, were beginning to dry out. Here's a shot of a soybean field down Sandhill Road west of our house in Okemos. I hopped out of my car on the way to work to get this shot. That's no permanent pond. It's a flooded low spot, which fills up when the snow melts or the spring rains are heavy. The family who owns this field has never been able to keep the spot dry enough to plant in it regularly. Ducks and geese stay in the pond when the water is up, but then quickly move on when the water gets low or stagnant.

The Spring Blizzard of '07

We've been staying in touch with our daughter, Miranda Davis, all weekend during one of the biggest snowstorms of the past 20 years on the south shore of Lake Superior. I've heard and read differing figures, but it seems that the mining ghost town named Delaware about 11 miles southwest of Copper Harbor got about 40 inches of snow over three days. It was a true blizzard, with north winds blowing at 40 to 50 for lengthy periods. I've been bugging Mir to send me some shots of the action up in CH since we were last there, but she hasn't done so until now. Here's a shot of her standing on a trail somewhere in the woods near town a couple days ago, after the blizzard had let up:

Looks as though it was quite the storm, even for the Keweenaw. Here's another shot from Mir, this one taken outside her and Art's log cabin near the Mariner Restaurant:

The birds will have to look elsewhere for sustenance -- and for warmth. If the forecasts can be trusted, it looks as though this is going to be a long spell of April cold and snow in the Keweenaw and all along the Superior south shore. Notably, my parents, Don and Betty, made their way back to CH through Escanaba on Saturday and found just a trace of snow on the ground on the south side of the Upper Peninsula. Of course, it's cold everywhere east of the Rockies and north of a line about 200 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico.

West On Our Road

I said I wouldn't often be timely on this blog, but I tried to do it today. This shot was taken last evening, a half mile west of our house in Okemos. That's Drew on the left, looking sulky, as instructed, and Logan on the right, carrying books in his fleece jacket, as is his wont (good, good boy). Drew is entering middle school next year. Marsh and I were talking about the school requirement for the kids to run a mile. We didn't think Drew was ready. So we're going to try to get him ready. We started out yesterday with a mile and a half walk down Standhill to a spot I wanted to get a photo of around sundown. The moon had come up behind us in the east during the walk west, and when we turned around, we had some lovely views of the moon sailing over the empty farm fields as we walked home. Marsh didn't join us because this week she has had a touch of the stomach flu that has been going around the whole Midwest lately. Even two Detroit Pistons basketball players went down with this nasty virus recently. Drew was getting a little irritated by this point in the walk, but he made it all the way in good shape. We'll do some more regular walking before starting to run, probably a third mile to start out.

A little later in the walk, just across the street from our house, there was a very dim golden glow lighting one of the droopy power poles along Sandhill, as the very last bit of twilight sifted over anything it could touch before night settled over all the landscape. Here's a shot of that scene.

The Bed of a Pickup

If I had not put up that title how quickly would you have recognized this photo as a shot across the bed of a pickup truck? This was taken at the Detroit Auto Show some six weeks ago. This is one of those sorts of photos that can be interpreted in probably countless ways. What do you see and think and feel as you look at this composition? It might be the equivalent of an abstract painting. The people might be considered only incidental shapes to bring out the contrast between the red section and the blue section, with their contrasting colors and textures and forms. Or do you see some social statement or some personal vision in this? I find the photo very interesting, and to generate a viewer's interest (my own interest as viewer included) was probably all that was on my conscious mind as I took it. I'm not usually this kind of photographer. I usually most appreciate telling a story through a photo, and the story, to be a story, must somehow be decipherable, cogent, sensible as story. But I also am drawn to striking contrasts in my surroundings and in my life, and this photo also was taken because of my interest in showing one of the many kinds of contrast that I find express something important about my experience. Well, there's enough artsy talk for one day. I'll return to something more customarily story-like next time around. All interpretations welcome.

Glaze Snow

Before winter has hopped the big train to get to the southern hemisphere for the change of seasons, I still have a cache of winter shots from Copper Harbor that I want to get on the blog. This photo shows what amounts to a frosty morning in the woods up in the Keweenaw. It's not frost, as you might guess, but a sort of rime ice, though it was actually half snow and half ice. But there are word differences that need resolving. What does the phrase "rime ice" apply to? What is shown in the Okemos photo from the previous post, I have read, is called by some "rime ice", though I have always called what is shown there "frost", or "hoar frost". Some say that what I and others call "rime ice", the ice that is driven by wind and forms on trees or buildings, is properly called "glaze ice". I will have to investigate that language issue further. But I like the phrase glaze ice and will put it to use.

This photo was taken very near the shores of Lake Medora, near the boat launch. The lake is about four miles west of CH along US-41. The wind often drives across the lake and slashes into the trees. If it's snowing at all, the wind will build up a thick coating of snow or semi-ice on the side of the trees facing the wind. Along the shore of Lake Superior, when the lake is still mostly open except for shore ice, the wind will drive spray from the lake waves onto the shoreside trees and create rime ice (as it has been often called) or "glaze ice" on the windward side. But the trees in this shot are actually pasted with glaze snow, though upon inspection I found that the wind had so tightly compressed the snow against the bark that it was nearly a fluffy form of ice. As my Dad mentioned in his comment to my previous post, CH does not often get hoar frost like that shown in the post about Okemos, three hundred miles south of CH (as the crow flies; it's 550 miles as the automobile drives). What the CH area almost always gets is glaze snow and glaze ice.

Frost

It was a very frosty morning in Okemos one day a couple weeks ago. There had been fog over night, but the temperature had dropped, and the fog began adhering to everything it touched. This is our front yard in Okemos, on the west side of our house. I was heading for work and took the the camera just in case there were some good shots to be had along the foggy roads to Michigan State that morning. Beauty often seems to spring at you out of nowhere, no matter the source of the beauty, even when you're writing or reading. I was backing out of the drive, saw the branches of our little crabapple caked in frost, and hopped out of the car to get the shot. Within an hour a warm late-winter sun had melted and evaporated all the frost, and now, two weeks later, there is no hint of this scene in our front yard, since all the snow is gone.

Birch Stand and Global Warming

The broad stand of birches about a mile east of Copper Harbor, down the Slaughters Lake Road and then down the Horseshore Harbor Road, has always been one of my favorite places in the area. My family (Miranda Davis, Marsha, Logan, Drew, and I) and my brother Don took a drive out that way in early January. I took this shot from the top of my Dad's pick-up as we slowly worked our way back toward CH from the Horseshoe Harbor entrance. You can see that conditions were rather unusual for this neck of the woods at this time of year, as I have discussed before. There was panic about the lack of winter business back then, but things have changed by now a great deal. A long cold spell with lots of snow brought the snowmobilers and skiers and cross-country skiers, and the CH businesses that stay open in winter had a decent second half of the winter tourist season.

But just this very day, March 16, 2007, the news came out that 2006 was the warmest year in recorded history on planet Earth. Do you think that human industrial activity is creating this warming and that it is leading to disaster? The belief in these two concepts appears, from my view, to be spreading and strengthening. Yet I noticed on this very day as well that the Hoover Institution, which is relatively politically conservative but still generally sound (in my judgment), has an article out that claims that global warming is NOT as significant nor as terrifyingly problematic as we have been led to believe by hundreds of reputable scientists and scholars. This is all related, as you see, to the Problem of Disagreement, which my book of philosophy is about. It can be found at:

http://www.msu.edu/user/kilpela/disagree.htm

My opinion. I remain undecided, but as with many such matters, material and spiritual, we've got to make the best guess on the best evidence we have, and I don't think we should wager that global warming is not a significant danger and the result of our industrial activity with what we know so far. The evidence might not be fully persuasive that global warming is real and a threat, but should we take a chance that it isn't? Right now, I think the probabilities suggest that we should do something to curb the activities that appear to be causing global warming. You might want to chase down a review or two about Richard Posner's (the fascinating and philosophically "pragmatic" American judge) book about thinking about the risks of potential catastrophes and doing something about them. I can't remember the exact title, but by searching on "Posner" and "catastrophe", you should get to a number of reviews.

Thanks to all for visiting my blogs. I hope you find reasons to keep coming back.

Detroit Auto Show

A friend from my MSU office and I went down to Detroit for the North American Auto Show a few weeks ago, for the first time since the early 1980s. The scenes it laid before my wondering eyes were quite a contrast to the Michigan haunts I commonly inhabit, the woods and fields of central lower Michigan and the wild shores and forests of Lake Superior. I had heard that the Show was conducting an amateur photo contest and so brought along my camera to see whether I could capture anything I thought worthy of entering. But, alas, I didn't succeed as I had hoped. I needed more time to study the hall and concentrate on some test shots before trying to take a few shots that might have a chance in a competition. Nonetheless, I did take a fews shots that I liked and thought skillful and expressive. Here's one, of an older concept car that had never seen a day of mass production but was still worth admiring as an historical icon of modern technology. I was back in the wild woods, way up on the Keweenaw Peninsula, within days of this foray into modern commericialization, but the experience was enlightening.

Winter Day in Okemos

We've had some tough winter days down in southern Michigan, too. Here's a shot across one of the wide farm fields, harvested of corn, near our house in Alaeidon Township, just south of Okemos proper (which as an incorporated governmental unit is known actually Meridian Township), which is across the I-96 expressway from the main developed area near our home. The photo was taken on a Saturday about three weeks ago during that massive snowstorm that crossed the center of the country and brought half a foot of snow to Indiana and lots of other bad weather from Louisiana up to Ontario, including dozens of serious thunderstorms and tornadoes in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and other states far down south. It was a bitter cold day -- we had a long cold spell in the Lower Peninsula after the warm start to winter -- with sustained winds kicking up over 30 m.p.h. and some gusts up to 50. To get this shot, I was sitting in my old green van with the driver's side window rolled down. It's still amazing to me that we have all this modern technology to protect us so well from the extremes of nature and even allow us to record it in this way. What an age in which we live.

Ice Wall on the Lake Superior Shore

How things can change. This shot was taken six weeks later than the previous shot of my son Drew taking a bite of Lake Superior ice along the open shore of the Big Lake. This shot is of my older son Logan, now 14, on top of the high cliff facing north on the northeast end of Porters Island, down near the Copper Harbor Lighthouse. Lake Superior closed down in the intervening weeks. This cliff is about 20 feet at the highest. I was standing on the frozen Lake looking up the face of the cliff, which Logan was working his way to the top of with his cousin Griffin Kastamo, from Calumet. He didn't make it. Marsha, his Mom, was worried about him taking a fall on the totally ice-covered ridge that forms this short cliff. I don't blame her. It's narrow at the top of the ridge. It looked a little unsafe. I should have taken him up there, but other sights attracted me away from this one. There was just too much to see that day, in late February.

An Ice Trapezoid for the Tasting

An irresistable taste of Lake Superior. Nothing like it on a nice, calm winter's day. This is my son Drew, now 11, out near Hunters Point on the outside of Copper Harbor. The shot was taken back in early January of 2007, so notice that the big outcropping behind Drew has no ice or snow on it, even though we were standing on the edge of the Big Lake. It might be hard to remember right now that there ever was a such a long warm spell at the start of this year and a very slow start to winter overall. My son-in-law Art says the wind was howling and the snow blowing this past weekend up in CH as a blizzard swept across the Upper Peninsula. The wind built up three-foot drifts on the Isle Royale Queen IV dock, he reports. As can be predicted quite easily, the power went out in Copper Harbor a couple times over the long, hard winter weekend. I don't even pay attention to Drew's love of gnawing solid water when up north, but a few weeks later we were taking a hike along the Red Cedar River in Okemos, in central southern Michigan (the river that farther downstream winds through the MSU campus), and he started to take a nibble of some ice he had broken off at river's edge. I had to warn him quickly that one cannot safely eat the ice of a river anywhere in southern Michigan, sad to say.

On the Cusp of March Madness in Michigan

My nephew Sam Eberhard (son of Susie Q. Kilpela) starts on the Hancock Bulldogs varisity basketball team. During our visit to Copper Harbor a week ago, I insisted that all the family take the 45-mile jaunt to Hancock to see Sam play one of his final high school games. Here's a shot of Sam handling the ball on a drive from outside the three-point line. Hancock lost this game in overtime against Ontonogan, which appears to be a very fine team. But as the winter blues begin to set in, thousands of Copper Country folk also begin feeling that unbidden yet irresistable surge of enthusiasm for their kids and relations striving and refusing to yield in basketball and hockey tournaments all around the district. It's a great time for basketball down here in Okemos, too, where we have a fine high school team again this year (Class A state runners-up last year) under the always capable, steady, and exemplary coaching of Dan Stolz. Good fortune to all! Enjoy it, Sam! For you shall sooner than you think be an old athlete of only past glories like me.

The Couple and the Light

I just couldn't resist putting up a shot, in honor of the last photo of Art and Miranda Davis standing ON Copper Harbor (with the CH Lighthouse in the distance), of Art and Miranda standing beside the CH Lighthouse on their wedding day, September 2006. The visit to the lighthouse on their day was allowed as a very special gift to a couple who partially grew up and started their life together in Copper Harbor. Quite a different day, eh? It was quite cool, but the sunshine still felt like summer on Miranda's shoulders. The temperature just a few hours later dropped to 32 degrees. Still, we all had a grand time at the reception outside the CH Community Building.