The first blizzard of the season rolled in after Thanksgiving. It wasn’t a “doozy” (the technical term for “big,” I believe), it was one of those that unravel slowly in temperatures that hover around freezing: starts as rain, turns into heavy wet snow and the slurry freezes into what becomes an arm and back workout to recover from for days. And with that, all the ruts cut by tires into that slush on the roads, frozen into trenches that will linger in the side streets until April. It was a first dumping that we’ve become accompanied to in these parts for the last six-plus years. There’s no gradual, seasonal slide anymore. The leaves drop and the temperature herky-jerks 20, 30 degrees day-to-day until the first sloppy “doozy” comes. But, hey. According to No. 45, there’s no such thing as climate change.
After popping some ibuprofen to tamp down the ache in my shoulder from roof-rake use, I trudged downstairs to the home office and scanned in some negatives from the 120 rolls I developed back in September after a busy summer shooting with the old gear—a couple Hasselblads, a Rolleiflex and a Speed Graphic, with a combined age of 235 years. (The Speed Graphic, with its suitcase-sized “camera case” always draws a sigh and an eye-roll from the spouse as I wedge it into the Jeep for our annual family trek to Canada, taking up valuable trunk space.)
These few shots are from the Fourth of July, which I spent with my wife and daughter in Amery, Wis. It was not where I expected to be, nor what I expected. Despite having travelled plenty around the state, prior to this past summer, the only thing I knew about Amery was that it was a 45-minute drive from Stillwater Minn. This I was told in 1996 by coworkers at the Stillwater Gazette—a youngish married couple. They sold ads for and designed an insert we printed, TV Facts, a TV Guide-like book packed with local advertising. I worked downstairs in the press room, doing the darkroom work—“screening” photographs, i.e. re-shooting all of them taken for the day’s newspaper into halftones for the cut-and-paste (or wax, rather) layout team. Yes, we still did page layout like that as recently as the mid- late-1990s.
“Forty-five minutes?” I asked, incredulously. I did not, and still do not, like long commutes. In addition, navigating the most convenient St. Croix River crossing on their route—the old, two-lane Stillwater Lift Bridge—easily added chunks of time to that commute during rush hours. And during the winter? Forget it. I knew that reality intimately, as I lived in Hudson, Wis. at that time.
“It’s not so bad,” they said. “Get more bang for your buck, house-wise, out there.”
That fact, I suppose, led to my mother and step-father to purchase a townhome earlier this year in the Amery area. They refused to return to Minnesota (or any higher-tax state), having contracted the illness many older folks have been afflicted with: Fox “News” syndrome, which results in anti-tax and anti-Democratic thoughts (never mind how they benefited from Democratic initiatives, such as organized labor, pensions, tax-funded education, good roads, etc.).
So, for the last decade they split time between South Dakota and Arizona. The irony of their move to Wisconsin was the election of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who defeated the incumbent right-winger Scott Walker, as they were signing their purchase agreement.
Anyway. With St. Paul cancelling Fourth of July fireworks for the second year in a row (wha—?), and the wife’s parents having sold their shack in Minocqua, Wis., which put on a nice display, we weren’t sure where to drag the punk for the booms and blasts of color. Then came the invite to Amery.
The parents’ place is on the shore of Wapogasset Lake, a few miles west of Amery, but the fireworks were downtown, in a field still soggy from recent heavy rains. There we sat, with a large group of strangers in the dark, forgetting for moments, minutes, or perhaps the hour, the insanity and exhaustion that’s been dropped on everyone these last three years and experienced blooming fireworks launched skyward. We’re all lucky, compared to many other parts of the globe, to be able to do that.
With the photos, I was experimenting with the limits of Ilford ISO 3200 film without flash, running a few rolls of 120 through my old Hasselblad 500c. I didn’t know what to expect, as the only illumination were the fireworks (and focusing as one might guess, was more of an opportunity-knocks and/or set-the-aperture-and-crank-to-infinity type-of-thing), but found many of them, while drained of color, reflect a calmness, a shared wonder of sorts in the dark, illuminated by the fireworks above.
