Forlorn in the north

The Lady Friend and I drove back to Evanston this weekend from the Writer's Lair, now closed up for the winter, and we just had to stop half a dozen times so that I could photograph roadside ruins such as this desolate farm just off U.S. 45 a few miles north of Bruce Crossing, Michigan.

Upper Michigan is full of such abandoned dreams. Hopeful settlers emigrated there from Europe 100 to 150 years ago, seeking their fortunes first in the copper rush of the 1840s, then the lumber boom of the 1880s and 1890s, and finally the subsistence farm movement of the early 1900s. Now the mines are closed, the forests are largely second-growth pulpwood, and the few remaining farmers scrabble to survive.

Yet the land's wild beauty lives on, and even the fading remnants of failure capture the eye. There's something noble and monumental about these testaments to human effort, however fleeting they may be as nature slowly absorbs their bones.