The art of the Porkies

The Porcupine Mountains rise up on a spit of green land sticking out into Lake Superior, so named because from a distance – say, from my beach — they resemble the quilly creatures that also munch the bark there. I’ve been spending even more time than usual in these woods this summer, as my son has been working there. (I’ll post about our Escarpment Trail hike shortly.) The great conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold argued for the preservation of “the Great Uncut” in 1942, helping to lead to the founding of the state park. With their old-growth forests, cerulean ponds, and Superior beaches, the Porkies inspire. That was evident at an exhibit of artwork created by participants in the artist-in-residence program that was on display over the Labor Day weekend at the performing arts theater in Ontonagon.

The Porcupine Mountains, as seen from my beach.

Full disclosure: I was one of those artists in 2009, when I spent two unforgettable weeks in Dan’s Cabin in the woods. Dan is a reference to Dan Urbanski, the late photographer whose painting-like images of Lake of the Clouds, the Northern Lights, Superior stones, etc., adorn many a Porkies visitor’s wall, including my own. The cabin memorializes the muse he found here in the Porkies, and that clearly visited the many painters, printers, writers, musicians, photographers, drawers, sculptors, etc., whose work was on display this past weekend. I’ve been to cutting edge galleries and historic museums around the world, and I was impressed by this show of diverse talents. (Again, admittedly, I’m biased.) A delicate, detailed watercolor of an angel-wing mushroom by Erin Duff, a medical illustrator. A whimsical oil painting of bears frolicking outside Dan’s Cabin by Joe Heywood. (I have seen black bears in the Porkies, but not partying like this.) My iPhone snapshots here don’t do them justice. The show was temporary but you can check out, and even buy, some of the artwork online at the Friends of the Porkies website. The Friends also produce the music festival I wrote about last week. Even better: Come see these hills and lakes yourself, and show us what you see.

Bottom Up in the UP

(Originally published on MOLI 8/14/8)

We (the media elite) generally think of culture with a big C: the high arts, or else, the mass arts. Ballet or Britney. The folk arts seem quaint, antiquated, parochial. Yet in fact, the artistic drive thrives in small, local institutions, where the heavy lifting of cultural creation and curation is part of the fabric of daily life — far from spotlights and flashbulbs.

I’m talking about places like the Ontonagon County Historical Society and the Ontonagon Theater of Performing Arts, that build the cultural fabric from the bottom up. These two institutions, one decades old, one founded a few years ago, promulgate and preserve the intellectual, imaginative life in a part of the world generally defined by physical culture: hunting, fishing, skiing, boating, snowmobiling, ATVing — or working in the mill, the shipyard, the forests. In the past month I’ve been in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I’ve written about Calumet and the Porkies, but I’ve tended to neglect the town that has always been the center of my summer sojourns, Ontonagon.

Ontonagon, aka Harbor Town, is a boom and bust town if there ever was one. Located at the egress of the Ontonagon River, it has been a portal between the county’s interior and Lake Superior — and, thereby, the world — since the 1800s. Vast swathes of timber used to float here; at the end of the 19th century, they caught on fire and the entire town burned down, except for the brick lighthouse on the river’s west side. That lighthouse is still there today; the historical society offers daily tours. Progress has been so halting in this part of the world that the past is palpably present, not just in the form of relics (a century-old windup foghorn), but in the family names: Many of the old lighthouse keepers’ descendants are still Ontonagon citizens.

The historical society also runs a museum in downtown Ontonagon that is chock a block with artifacts of a frontier life that’s still very much in sway. Needless to say, mostly retirees and teenagers volunteer their time to keep this effort afloat. Bruce Johanson, my husband’s old music teacher, was our avuncular tour guide for the lighthouse. (Two weeks before, his daughter Linda, also a school teacher, took us horseback riding). These are the unheralded stars of small-town cultural institutions, as important in their own right as Brad and Angelina.

Yet another teacher — god bless the educators! — spearheaded the effort to put a theater in the town’s old brick library building a decade ago. Dana Brookins and her Harbortown Players put on several plays a year; tonight, their version of Gypsy opens. I admit full nepotism here: my dog Otis’s father is one of the cast members, and Dana is one of my husband’s oldest friends. The Ontonagon Theater of Performing Arts also hosts visiting artists — shining a beacon of its own.

No discussion of Ontonagon cultural institutions would be complete without a mention of Stubb’s, the bar/museum that has been a repository for yellowing mining photos, taxidermied animals, beer cans, traps, liquor-advertising paraphenalia, and Packers memorabilia since the ’30s. It’s like a Hard Rock Cafe, with guns and bears instead of guitars and costumes. My parents took me here for afternoon Cokes when I was a wee lass. Now, every summer, we hold our annual Canada vs. U.S. foosball tournament here. Since America won again this year, the trophy now stands amid the overflow of bric-a-brac behind the bar, making my life almost complete.