Gaastra, Michigan -- May 28, 2007

This is the first of a series of posts I hope to do featuring pictures from various travels I've done. I enjoy photography, though I'm not particularly good at it. So any tips on improving the photographs (in the comments) would be greatly appreciated!

This post contains four pictures from the town of Gaastra and its surroundings, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which I visited back at the end of May on a swing through the Midwest. The area has a generally depressed farming economy and a few remnant mining and timber operations. Like Vilas County, just over the border in Wisconsin, it has begun to transition into a service-vacation economy; the area is dotted with small glacial lakes and kettle moraines, which make it prime location for summer cottages and recreation for Midwestern city-slickers.

This picture was taken in the town of Gaastra in the local playground. This swingset was the best-maintained piece of equipment in the place. Tire swings were pretty common when I was a kid, though today they're considered dangerous because water collects in them and breeds mosquitoes and other nasty things. (Here in San Francisco, all of the playgrounds are nice and safe and made out of colored plastic.) But not in Gaastra, where the tire swing still reigns supreme:


This next picture was taken just outside of town. The soil in this part of the country is littered with rocks, courtesy of the retreating glaciers of the last Ice Age. Farmers had to clear them all by hand. Sometimes they used them to make neat stone walls like this one:


However, typically there were so many of them that they would also just create enormous piles of rocks in the middle of the field and just farm around them:


(Incidentally, the above setting is one of my favorites in the area. The light wasn't ideal when I got there, but I plan to go back and take a few more next time I'm in the area.)

Finally, there's this shot. For some reason, barns with smiley-faces are a fairly common sight in the Great Lakes region (also watertowers with smiley-faces). So are barbed wire fences. So this shot brings the Midwest's two great tastes together, in one "good fences make good neighbors" taste sensation...