A Morning Without Mosquitoes (and Other Midwest Myths)
This past Tuesday, I found myself ankle-deep in mud and solitude in the Gordon MacQuarrie Wetlands, a curious little patch of manufactured marsh just south of Superior, Wisconsin. It’s not the sort of place you find accidentally, unless you regularly make wrong turns while chasing birds or fleeing civilization. The wetlands are clearly man-made—berms of dirt carefully arranged like a child’s sandbox experiment gone rogue, forming shallow irregularly shaped ponds of and equally uncertain purpose. The birds, bless them, seem quite fond of it. People, less so. Which is precisely why I love it.
The view from my floating blind: two Trumpeter Swans in the distance, blissfully unaware they’re in the middle of my photo.
I’d messaged my longtime photo buddy, Sparky, and suggested a morning shoot. He agreed, but showed up fashionably late. We ended up photographing in adjacent ponds, which is to say we were spent the morning together but never actually saw one another.. We exchanged a few cheerful “good morning” grunts via text, but both of us were too engrossed in trying to coax birds into camera range to pursue any deeper level of camaraderie.
Soft, shadowy, and a nightmare to focus—but the mood is everything. Two loons, a swampy curtain, and just enough light to feel like magic.
It was a perfectly clear morning, which, as any photographer will tell you, is a bit like being a vampire at a tanning salon. The light turns harsh before your tea has cooled and the sky becomes a vast, featureless expanse of nothingness. Still, I had the delightful company of two courting Trumpeter Swans and a pair of loons gliding about with the cool indifference of professional models. A few ducks made dramatic flybys, presumably late for something, but none felt inclined to stop and pose.
Backlit by sunrise and glowing like aquatic neon signs, these loons remind me nature’s lighting budget far exceeds mine.
I puttered around for a couple of hours, managing a few respectable shots of the loons and, eventually, surrendering to boredom—which, in my case, tends to manifest as a brief burst of questionable creativity. This led to an impromptu double exposure involving a lone swan and the opposite shoreline’s reflection. It’ll never be an instagram hit, but that’s maybe why I like it.
I lingered while packing up, savoring the rarest of Upper Midwest phenomena: a warm, mosquito-free morning. Honestly, these are rarer than blue moons or friendly government office attendants. By ten o’clock, I was home again—muddy, content, and quietly smug about the fact that I’d already put in a full morning by the time most civilized people were just deciding on cereal.
