Do you know that feeling when a lightbulb goes on, geographically speaking, and an abstract locale suddenly takes its place on your mental map? Like when I read Middlesex before moving to Detroit. Even though the metro city is a major protagonist in the novel, described in living detail down to the neighborhood, street, and house, in my imagination it was an immaterial literary place… until I moved here. Then suddenly, the historical and political and social dynamics so brilliantly narrated by Jeffrey Eugenides were situated for me, popping up like street signs and houses on the pages of a pop-up book. The novel – and the city with it – came alive in ways that felt concrete and dimensional.
Something similar happened with the Anthropocene concept. I read as voraciously as I can about the Anthropocene, trying to stay abreast of the lively debates among geologists about whether we are living in the Anthropocene, when it started, and how we know. I started reading about Crawford Lake when it was proposed as a possible Anthropocene “golden spike,” or location where the start of a new geological epoch is vividly legible in the earth. Blahdeblah, small Canadian lake, something about core samples, something technical about oxygen, interesting, I’m reading with my distracted internet brain. At some point, though, it hits me: Crawford Lake is in Ontario, Canada. Ontario is right across the border from us in Detroit. Wait, Crawford Lake is RIGHT THERE! This side of Toronto! In my general neighborhood, the Anthropocene golden spike. Amazing, mysterious universe.
Eddie and I took Federica, who is working on a PhD on sustainability and the Italian film industry, to Niagara Falls in November, and we decide to make a detour on our way home to visit Crawford Lake. Down the terrifying speedway that is the 407 to Toronto, off onto a small winding regional road, into the hills and forests to the quiet conservation area that houses The. Lake. I am so excited that I immediately start explaining my excitement to the first person I see in the parking lot, who happens to be a kind and well-informed site interpreter. We are not the first Anthropocene pilgrims to visit Lake Crawford, but he is still somewhat surprised at the park’s newfound geological fame. He shepherds us into an auditorium where we get to see a core sample extracted from the lake bottom, gazing in wonder at the clearly demarcated lines of sediment in which each passing year leaves its trace. And then down a well-trodden pathway to a boardwalk that, in less than a kilometer, circumnavigates the small lake.
The universe, great and good, gifts us not only the proximity of this site to Detroit but also a fascinating new vocabulary word: meromictic. Crawford Lake is incredibly deep compared to its small surface area, and so its waters do not completely mix each year: meromixis. At the bottom, however, in conditions unusual for a meromictic lake, groundwater provides oxygen to the depths of Crawford Lake, which somehow stabilizes the planetary evidence settling on its bed. A core sample from the lake some years ago alerted scientists that corn was being cultivated nearby, which led them to discover the foundations of Indigenous longhouses dating to the 15th century. More recently, the varves (or individual layers of the striated core) in core samples by a team of scientists led by Francine McCarthy (Brock University) reveal clear traces of radioisotopes from nuclear bomb tests starting in 1946-7, then increasing fossil fuel emissions in the 1950s. Anthropocene reading material that will remain for millennia to come.
Analog Anthropocene meets Anthropocene Golden Spike
When we get our first peek at the lake, one of the first things that occurs to me is, this isn’t going to be easy to photograph. The lake is small and surrounded by cedar trees, and there aren’t many unobstructed views of its waters. Also, photographing a placid Canadian lake doesn’t exactly communicate the momentous things going on at the lake bottom. And then there’s the fact that we are getting on towards dusk on a gray late fall day. All these things are important because I have lovingly transported my Nikon FE2, loaded with a roll of Ferrania P30, and the film isn’t very sensitive and my analog photography skills are questionable. I am determined, though, to get some eloquent shots.
I squint, crouch, lean, contort. Focus, refocus. Gaze at the lake, peer through the lens. Federica documents the process. I am creating a luminous photosensitive imprint at the ground zero of planetary imprints. I imagine that some seemingly indiscernible traces of our visit—a hair, a skin cell, fossil fuel emissions—will settle to the bottom of the lake taking their place in Anthropocene history. We are documenting the Anthropocene, we are living in the making of the Anthropocene.
Back in Detroit, I hurry to Woodward Camera with my precious photographic cargo. I take the last couple of pictures on the roll in the parking lot—I love the shop’s iconic logo on signs in the parking lot. I’m at 36 exposures but the film keeps advancing… and keeps advancing… and doesn’t stop. I press the rewind button and it doesn’t quite feel right. I try to rewind and the little lever resists. I take the whole camera sheepishly in the store, where an expert employee (who also happens to be an art photographer and has taken gorgeous Analog Anthropocene pictures) figures out that one of the perforations at the beginning of the role was busted, and the film was probably never advancing at all. I am simultaneously heartbroken and, somehow, unsurprised. The roll is still full of unexposed film. The roll is empty of photos.
In light of this minor disaster, the pictures you see here of me photographing and also not photographing Crawford Lake take on new meaning. For one, they feel a little ridiculous, like traces of a self-indulgent social media photo shoot—empty gestures, though they weren’t intended to be. But they also signal loss, which is an important Anthropocene marker, too, if one that is hard to read. The Anthropocene is also about erasure, subtraction, absence: extracted core samples, minerals, fossil fuels; species extinctions; forgotten histories; missed opportunities for justice, equity, more-than-human connection.
Maybe the photos-that-weren’t are good documents of that Anthropocene pilgrimage after all.
