black ice

Black ice is that thin sheet of solidly frozen rain that refracts no light and so is invisible adhered to the road.

It also seems a fitting enough title for the photo above, which I took from my canoe on Ann Arbor’s Huron River earlier this month, below Barton dam, where the spillway had kept half a mile of the river from freezing completely over.

Black Ice is also the predictably cheesy name of the album behind which AC/DC was touring Dec. 6 when I saw them in Buenos Aires’ Estadia River Plate with 70,000 amped-up Argentinians. You have got to see this video. Check out the floor scene about a minute in. That’s where I was.

home again

I spent pretty much all of December, the 3rd through the 27th, out of Ann Arbor. I was traveling in South America for the first time under the auspices of the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace Fellowship, and then spent four days in Atlanta with my sister and her family for Christmas. The picture above is Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro, a little over a week ago. Today in Ann Arbor the high was 20. I was glad to be gone, and I’m glad to be home.

First we went to Buenos Aires, Argentina for six days, where we met with the president of the state bank, talked with Argentina’s first female Supreme Court judge, visited the mothers of the disappeared of the dirty war of 1977, saw a tango performance, went to a local soccer match, met with the editors of Clarin, the city’s largest newspaper, rode horses and swam on an estancia dude ranch, saw AC/DC rock a crowd of 70,000 on the third night of a three-night stand in the River Plate soccer stadium, and consumed enough beef and red wine to choke a herd of horses, among other pleasing educations and diversions.

Then we went to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where we met with directors of the city’s largest private and public hospitals, lunched with the editors of the major daily, went to the beach for a day, ate dinner with locally posted foreign correspondents at the exclusive jockey club, had lunch at a local samba school, held seminars with academic historians, toured the black history museum, saw the Sao Paulo symphony orchestra play Mahler’s 5th Symphony in a refurbished Danish Modern-meets-Greek Revival hall that previously housed both a train station and a dictator’s interrogation staff, and waited outside for a cab under the watchful eye of a crowd of crack addicts.

When that was over I spent another two days in Paraty, a 16th-century Portuguese colonial town on the coast, and another three nights in Rio de Janeiro, where I took the trolly to the top of the Sugarloaf, hang-glided onto a beach, saw a massive Carnival rehearsal in the Sambadrome, drank several gallons of caipirinhas, and took a cool picture of Jesus. That is not photoshopped.

It’s been pretty fantastic. I took a lot of pictures. Some Argentina and Brazil pics are posted HERE.

two pennies to rub together

This book took me longer to read than most. I set it aside for long stretches, but those stretches rarely felt as long as the stretches I spent reading it.

File this one under corporate history; fawning. It’s by some once-well-regarded hack of a newspaperman (below; author crosses self) who apparently found himself consumed by copper. The first that I found was this, at left, a hagiographic history of the Anaconda Copper Company, the mining behemoth based in Butte, Montana that dominated that state’s economy, politics, and media for the first half of the 20th century and beyond. It was sold off in 1977. BP owns its trail of destruction.

I can’t resist: Anaconda (1957) is the literary equivalent of hard-rock mining. It’s dark, dusty work and you come up with what feels like about $2 a day. I’m only reading it on the off-chance that I might remember something about it that might inform a book I might be trying to write about the Clark Fork River, which as a result of Anaconda’s operations became the most geographically extensive EPA Superfund cleanup site in the U.S., slushed full of toxic mine tailings and bleeding arsenic, a status from which it’s undergoing dramatic remediation.

Not once is an environmental concern or consequence mentioned in Isaac Marcosson’s Anaconda, which is probably the most lasting bit of learning I’ll glean from it. In official circles, nobody knew, and/or nobody cared, and/or it just didn’t matter, because there was so damn much money to be made.

Marcosson came to the subject matter organically, having already written a history of the colonial roots of the American copper refining industry: Copper Heritage (1955). It pretty much started with Paul Revere. And here I’d always thought of Revere as a silver man.

I can’t say when or if I’ll get around to reading Copper Heritage. I know Marcosson’s style now. The Anaconda Company didn’t get rich mining low-grade ore.

Much more fun and at least as informative in this endeavor is The Copper Kings of Montana, a Landmark Book about the epic territorial, litigious and legislative shit-storms between Marcus Daly and William Clark and Frederick Augustus Heinze that preceded Anaconda’s emergence as king of the Butte hill (a hill, in the middle of an American city, that the company later stripped into a pit).

The Copper Kings is peppered with two-color illustrations, prose a sixth-grader could understand (author crosses self), and a childlike appreciation for a little good conflict to move the story along. Anaconda didn’t get to be the largest and most powerful mining conglomerate in the world without stepping on a few toes (or destroying a few rivers), Marcosson unconvincingly to the contrary.

The Copper Kings is simplified truth for sure, a child’s-eye view, but in a lot of ways it’s a much more sophisticated book than Anaconda— a title so enslaved to its master that even a kid could see the chains. Plus: pictures!

double-parted

Sorry, this is turning into a photo/river tripping blog. When in Michigan…

This is me on the Upper Peninsula’s Two-Hearted River, a twisty tea-colored little woodland stream that finally slips through a gauntlet of dunes and dumps into Lake Superior, which, as you know, is like God’s own birdbath. The Two-Hearted is the nominal setting of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Big Two-Hearted River,” which is collected in The Nick Adams Stories.

My friend Fred Maxwell says that he read on Wikipedia that it’s thought that Hemingway, like a true stingy-ass honey-hole-hiding fisherman, was actually describing the UP’s Fox River in his story, but gave it the Two-Hearted’s name, perhaps to throw off tourists and poachers, or maybe because Two-Hearted is just such a goddamn beautiful name for a river. I haven’t bothered to look it up. I’m not sure it matters to me.

I spent two days and one night on it, maybe 24 miles’ worth, the first day portaging 13 unstable logjams and the second day blissing the fuck out.

When I put in there was a guy walking down the bank fishing. About halfway downriver at the state campground where I camped there was another guy with an RV and an ATV who left in the morning to fish for steelhead. The night before he came over and looked at my anemic little sock-drying campfire and offered to let me borrow his chainsaw. I thanked him but no. I asked and he explained to me why there are salmon out there nowhere near the sea. It’s because they were imported to the Great Lakes purposefully to eat a smaller fish that was imported to the Great Lakes accidentally, and they started spawning up these little tea-colored woodland streams. More or less. They’re stocked as sport fish as well.

I threw a spinner out from the sand ramp for a while but I have yet to discover the finer joys of fishing, though I’m not through looking.

I did take lots of what came out looking like portraits of trees, among other things, and posted the better ones to flickr. The one at top links to Part 1. The one below links to Part 2.

up north

Last weekend I traveled with my fellow fellows to northern Michigan, in the neighborhood of Boyne City and Lake Charlevoix, for some quality time with the leaves. I stayed over on Sunday and paddled about four blustery hours down the Jordan River, Michigan’s first-designated Wild and Scenic such. Spectacular.

I posted some pictures at my flickr page.

through a looking glass

Tunnel, originally uploaded by bradtyer.

Went out on Argo Pond today, the pond just downstream from Barton Pond, on the Huron River here through Ann Arbor. Argo is the one they’re talking about draining by removing Argo Dam. You see bumper stickers and yard signs saying “Save Argo Pond.” The pond is lousy with crew practice, and I gather crew teams and the people who love them are the primary opposition to taking the dam out. Why anyone would want to sit backwards in a rowboat and get yelled at I do not know, but to each his or her own.

I was there trying out a new paddle I bought for myself as an early birthday present. Actually I just bought it because I wanted it, but I do have a birthday coming up, so fair enough. It’s a narrow beavertail blade, a shape I’ve never paddled before, and it’s made of oiled black walnut. A company in Maine called Shaw & Tenney makes it. Lord it’s a lovely paddle. Everybody has at least nine paddles, right?

I was also trying out a new 10-20 mm wide-angle lens I bought myself because I’ve got a birthday coming up.

It seems I’m going to take a lot of pictures of these ponds. I’ll try to limit myself to the goodish ones.

Two from this trip are on flickr.

balloon shroom

So my place in Ann Arbor is a 13-minute walk down a two-lane blacktop road that dead-ends into something called Bird Hills Nature Area, a couple of hours worth of forest trails. I’ve been walking down there for an hour or so every morning, but it’s too dark in there to take pictures then. Today I slept late so I got my walk in this afternoon and there was a bit of nice light filtering in.

I noticed this mushroom on my walk the other day, though I wasn’t sure it wasn’t some sort of discarded ball until I got up close to it. When I got home I looked it up in the Falcon Guide to North American Mushrooms and found out it’s a Calvatia booniana, or Western Giant Puffball. It doesn’t seem to belong where I found it, according to the habitat description, but there it is. Apparently it’s edible, having been “collected and eaten since pioneer days.” I can’t see my way to taking it, though. I haven’t seen any others out there, and it’s pretty magnificent, about the size of a small bowling ball. That, and this whole shroom-identifying thing is about three days old, and if the ID seems close to unmistakable, early overconfidence is a long habit, and I’d just as soon not start my way up the learning curve by poisoning myself.

I took a different trail through the woods today, but I doubled back to see if I could find this thing. When I did, it had a rare shred of glow on it for just the amount of time it took to snap about four pictures, of which this one turned out the best.

I posted some more pictures to flickr.

ponding

I’ve been in Ann Arbor a week tonight. I went out on Barton Pond for the second time today. It’s dam-slacked water on the Huron River, and I can get my canoe on it in about 10 minutes flat, from garage to glide. It’s pretty nice. Two days ago I went downstream and back about an hour all told to Barton Dam, the little generator spillway that holds it back. Today I put in at the same little railroad bridge and went upstream, about an hour to where the current started running too riverlike to want to work against it, then turned around. I took some pictures. I’ve been thinking about putting together a series called “floaters,” of stuff floating on water, and the feather will definitely be in it.

THE GOOD ONES ARE ON MY FLICKR PAGE.

texas river rearview

Before it gets too far behind me: my last column at the Texas Observer.

devolution of a blog, with dogs

I haven’t posted in while. I’ve been gearing up for a move from Austin to Ann Arbor. Now I’m in a Super 8 motel in Terre Haute, Indiana, reading the manual for my fancy new camera, which I’ve not a clue yet how to use. I expect to land in what everybody insists on referring to as A2 tomorrow evening.

This is the rig I seem to getting used to getting poured on at my granny’s house outside of Whitehouse,Texas.

 

This is one of the best pictures ever taken of Lady, age 13, owing nothing to the fancy new camera and everything to finally catching her with her slinky head up.

 

This is Pancho, also 13, wanting in. He pretty much always looks like this. I promise not to post any more pictures of dogs.