FIVE-DAY BLACK & WHITE PHOTO CHALLENGE – DAY 5
Kettle Morraine State Park, Wisconsin – 1978
Scanned from Kodak Plus-X negative film
To conclude this B/W photo challenge, I’m going to go back to one of the first rolls of black and white film I ever shot.
You may think that I’ve got an incredible memory to recount these stories from long ago. The truth is I often have travel journals to consult and that was the case of this trip in 1978. Or so I thought. I pulled out the notes and only found an entry for the first day. Either I didn’t write anything after the first day or I’ve lost the notes. So I can’t tell you about how I stumbled across this tree and lake or what I was thinking of when I pressed the shutter. Instead I’ll tell you the story of how I arrived to Kettle Morraine State Forest in the first place on that dreary autumn weekend.
During the summers I worked at a state park as a naturalist and would give talks about how the glaciers during the Ice Age carved out Wisconsin. I would talk about the morraines of southeast Wisconsin and yet I had never seen them. So I planned to go to Kettle Morraine State Forest on a weekend. I didn’t have a car while I was in university but didn’t need one. I had a very attractive thumb. Hitchhiking in Wisconsin was generally pretty good but it would have been easier to hitch to California than to Kettle Morraine as there were a number of road changes I had to make.
I got my first ride fairly quickly with a driver going to Green Bay and a bit further down the road we picked up another hitchhiker. The new hitchhiker pulled out a joint and he and the driver commenced to get high. I bailed out of the party at Waupaca.
Within minutes I got another ride, this time from a man who had hitchhiked in his youth and was now happy to re-pay the favour. We turned on the radio and heard a gruesome story about a hitchhiker pulling a knife on a driver. He looked at me and I looked at him and winked.
It took a few more rides before I got out of the Appleton/Menasha/Neenah metropolis. I was a bit surprised when a single woman stopped to pick me up but when she said she worked at the correctional facility in Waupun I realised she knew a hard core criminal when she saw one. She was going all the way to Beaver Dam and I realised my brother-in-law Duane and stepsister lived there. For a moment I considered going the distance with her but I really wanted to do some camping in the state forest. She dropped me off at her exit and I quickly realised there was no traffic going in my direction.
When Kettle Morraine seemed to be an impossible destination I backtracked and decided go to Beaver Dam. A semi truck picked me up and carried me a distance on US 26 before turning off. I popped in a tavern to use a phone and asked the locals about the route to Beaver Dam. A man enjoying the tail end of a Friday happy hour offered to take me to Beaver Dam if I were willing to wait till he finished another round or two of drinks. The sun was setting so I figured I’d try my luck and get an earlier ride and after a few minutes I was in a car bound for Beaver Dam.
My brother-in-law, Duane Frisbie, had recently moved to a new home and I didn’t have the address. I eventually managed to find his home but he and the family weren’t in. The neighbours confirmed Duane lived there but they must have been out for the night. The neighbours invited me in but I declined and instead went into Duane’s backyard and set up my tent, cooked some dinner on my camp stove and went to sleep by 8 PM as I was cold and exhausted. At sunrise Duane couldn’t figure out why there was a tent in his backyard but eventually I emerged and came into the house for breakfast.
I proceeded that day to Kettle Morraine and eventually made it. I found a campground which I pretty much had for myself as the cold weather kept most people in their homes. I spent the rest of the day exploring the morraines and at dusk found this single tree silhouetted against one of the lakes in Kettle Morraine.
