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diff --git a/published/2018-08-17_island-golden-breasted-woodpecker.txt b/published/2018-08-02_island-golden-breasted-woodpecker.txt
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--- a/published/2018-08-17_island-golden-breasted-woodpecker.txt
+++ b/published/2018-08-02_island-golden-breasted-woodpecker.txt
diff --git a/published/2018-08-05_northern-sky.txt b/published/2018-08-05_northern-sky.txt
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+Unable to leave Lake Superior behind, we decided to head west and north, out of Wisconsin, into Minnesota, through Duluth and up to the north shore of Lake Superior. 
+
+Here, for the first time in our Lake Superior travels, we hit real crowds. There aren't that many camping spots along the shore up here and nearly all of them offer online reservations, which means they're full most of the summer.
+
+We ended up heading inland, further north, up toward the Boundary Waters area. Once you get away from highway 61, which hugs the shore of Superior, it's mostly wilderness up here, and mostly dirt roads, which keeps the summer tourists away. We cut inland without any real clue where we were headed, but you rarely go wrong with fourteen miles of dirt road that looks like this: 
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-29_133754-1_nine-mile-lake_01_wn2DTLE.jpg" id="image-1598" class="picwide" />
+
+Eventually we found a campground on the edge of a smallish lake. It was relatively secluded and the water was plenty warm for swimming.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-31_145600_nine-mile-lake_01.jpg" id="image-1605" class="picwide" />
+
+The only downside was that Lake Superior was the better part of an hour away. We ended up only going down once, to Tettegouche State Park, to have one last day on the lake and say goodbye to Superior. I stopped in at the visitor center and asked the ranger if there was a good swimming beach around and she directed us a "nice beach, good for kids," at a little oxbow a ways up the river. Uh, yeah, we don't want to swim in a river. I had another of those increasingly common moments when I realize how much people underestimate children these days.
+
+I studied the map and didn't see any reason we couldn't hike the cliff side trail and figure out some way down to the water. As it turned out, plenty of people have had the very same idea and there was a well worn trail that led down to a nice rocky point sticking out into Superior. The kids scrambled over the rocks and were out of their clothes and into bathing suits fast enough to put a superhero to shame. 
+
+And then they stuck their feet in the water. Cold, very, very cold. The north shore of Superior is much colder than around Madeline Island. No one went in past their knees, but we did have a nice lunch and a rocky point all to ourselves for most of the day.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2018/20180730_115824.jpg" id="image-1601" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-30_125147_nine-mile-lake.jpg" id="image-1600" class="picwide" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/20180730_120219.jpg" id="image-1602" class="cluster pic5" />
+<img src="images/2018/20180730_124229.jpg" id="image-1604" class="cluster pic5" />
+</span>
+<img src="images/2018/20180730_120349.jpg" id="image-1603" class="picwide" />
+</div>
+
+You can't have the most prominent rocky headland to yourself for long in these parts though. By the time we were done eating there were a dozen other people on the beach and rocks around us. We packed it up and headed back up the dirt road to Ninemile Lake for warmer swimming.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-31_145359_nine-mile-lake.jpg" id="image-1608" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/20180731_105007.jpg" id="image-1606" class="picwide" />
+
+The lake was enough to entertain the kids for a few days, but eventually the weather took a turn.
+
+<img src="images/2018/20180801_074143.jpg" id="image-1607" class="picwide" />
+
+Faced with three more days of rain and a dirt road out, we decided to go ahead and push on, south, out of the north woods and into the plains, which just so happens to parallel the journey that makes up the last three books of the Birchbark House series.
diff --git a/published/2018-08-14_superior.txt b/published/2018-08-14_superior.txt
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+In the coldest parts of Lake Superior it takes discipline to convince yourself to swim. Just walking out knee deep in that water which looks no cloudier than air, but feels like a vise of cold squeezing at ever pore of your skin, takes concerted effort. 
+
+After a few steps your feet are numb. A few more and they begin to hurt. I never made it deep enough dive in at the coldest of the beaches, around Pictured Rocks, instead you lie down quickly, and then jump up, more of a baptism than a swim.
+
+After the gasping subsides, and you climb back out of the water to lie on the warm brown and apricot rocks, the sun slowing draws the blood out of your core and back to the edges of yourself with a prickling, almost painful feeling, like the rock is needling at your skin.
+
+This is the story of Lake Superior: water, rock, weather, and life.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-06-28_115528_picture-rocks.jpg" id="image-1479" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-06-27_153834_picture-rocks.jpg" id="image-1475" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-06-30_143747_picture-rocks.jpg" id="image-1486" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-06-30_151316_picture-rocks.jpg" id="image-1487" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/20180630_160952.jpg" id="image-1617" class="picwide" />
+</div>
+
+This is of course the story of everywhere as well. The world we experience with our senses is made up of water, rock, weather, life, and the relationships between them. Or, to use more familiar, but perhaps less fashionable terms, Water, Earth, Fire, Air and Spirit.
+
+On the shores of Lake Superior, Water and Earth are the most obvious. Nothing is written here without taking them into account. The shoreline is the story of rock and water moving through time. "The journey of the rock is never ended," writes poet Lorine Niedecker in a journal kept during a 1966 road trip around Lake Superior. "In every tiny part of any living thing are materials that once were rock that turned to soil," she reminds us. "Your teeth and bones were once coral."
+
+Niedecker does something here that few have done in recent times -- she makes us part of the story. Because we are part of the story, and have always been part of the story. Especially here. The "environmental" historian[^1] William Cronon writes of what he calls "historical wilderness,"[^2] an effort to remember that no matter what our ideologies and beliefs may claim, we are nature. Nature is not something outside of us and to pretend otherwise is to sell yourself a pack of lies that will leave you very confused about your place in the world.
+
+We have always been part of the story, the question is *how* are we part of the story? 
+
+As California is slowly starting to realize, John Muir's vision of untrammeled wilderness has always been about personal ideology more than anything else -- Man as the special snowflake that lies outside nature, though in this case the snowflake ruins everything. The problem with that vision is that it's demonstrably wrong. Muir's beloved Yosemite Valley was the beautiful vast meadow he writes about because the people who lived in it used controlled burns to keep it that way. It was a garden because they made it a garden. Muir and his ilk kicked those people out, put fences around the trees and now wonder why it all burns down.  
+
+Here on the shores of Superior humans have been part of the story for longer than anyone can remember, which helps stop ideologies that espouse otherwise. Once this was the land of the people we call Sioux, who were driven out by the Ojibwe, who in turn were driven out by European settlers, who in turn will be driven out by someone. We're all temporary.
+
+Right now though, this moment in history, is a good one for Superior. Somewhere in the elaborate dance between people and place that's been happening here for thousands of years is a feeling that's difficult to pin down, but is clear when you experience it.
+
+Lake Superior is one of those places where we immediately felt at home. The landscape, the forests, the water, the towns, everything up here feels welcoming and, for lack of the better word, good. In the 1960s, when it was still widely acknowledged that there were human experiences that did not fit into the world as defined by modern industrial society, people called this the "vibe" of a place (or person, or thing).
+
+The more closely you examine this feeling, the more complex the experience of it becomes. For those of us passing through it often feels more like a color or hue that seems to hand over the place. And Lake Superior is a place of many hues, literally and figuratively. Its water alone can be twenty different shades of blue and green in a single day.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2018/20180706_102610.jpg" id="image-1507" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-06_104925_shipwreck-tour_BD8R8mK.jpg" id="image-1501" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-05_141625_picture-rocks.jpg" id="image-1500" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-06_103844_shipwreck-tour.jpg" id="image-1499" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-06_090619_shipwreck-tour.jpg" id="image-1495" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-27_132328_apostle-islands.jpg" id="image-1587" class="picwide" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/20180730_120219.jpg" id="image-1602" class="cluster pic5" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-27_145020_apostle-islands.jpg" id="image-1590" class="cluster pic5" />
+</span>
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-28_125454_apostle-islands.jpg" id="image-1596" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-27_102831_apostle-islands.jpg" id="image-1579" class="picwide" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-28_051843_apostle-islands.jpg" id="image-1591" class="cluster pic5" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-28_120437_apostle-islands.jpg" id="image-1619" class="cluster pic5" />
+</span>
+</div>
+
+The notion that Lake Superior has a single vibe to it is of course a simplification. It has many shores, many faces, many vibes. It's also a place of moods that can turn on a dime. Sometimes it's warm and humid and icy waters are a relief, but then ten minutes later you might find the sky shrouded in clouds that bring near darkness and leave you shivering in the wind. 
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-07_145127_picture-rocks.jpg" id="image-1612" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-08_141644_picture-rocks.jpg" id="image-1613" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-08_141828_picture-rocks.jpg" id="image-1505" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-16_093403_whitefish-point.jpg" id="image-1551" class="picwide" />
+
+Part of Lake Superior's charm is that it has somehow escaped the "progress" of the world since about the early 1980s. Don't get me wrong, I think humans are part of the story, but lately I think we've been doing a really bad job of writing it. Curiously though, much of the crap that's come to infest our lives in the past few decades hasn't come here.
+
+It's not just that there's no Starbucks, no strip malls, almost no chain companies at all, though for the most part there are not, it's more that it has somehow retained that previous world, carried it through the recent past and left it alone. Old metal playgrounds abound, the family-owned single story motel still provides 99 percent of the lodging, supermarkets are usually locally owned, co-ops are common, and even elements of far older eras persist, like the supper clubs that still seem to function. Houses remain simple, small and cozy, the McMansions found in most other parts of the country simply aren't here.
+
+It's a place that seem to have recognized the difference between genuine human progress and technological advancement for its own sake and opted to stick with the former. Like the denizens of the Lake Superior region, I don't think we've seen much of real progress in technology since about 1978[^3] and even that would be pushing it. I can make a strong case for the early 1940s being the peak of human technological advancement, but I won't bore you with it.
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-29_122623-4_nine-mile-lake.jpg" id="image-1616" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-10_090902_andrus-lake.jpg" id="image-1538" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-14_115834_st-ignace-ojibwe.jpg" id="image-1550" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-14_115916_st-ignace-ojibwe.jpg" id="image-1614" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-29_114257-2_nine-mile-lake.jpg" id="image-1615" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-24_154053_apostle-islands.jpg" id="image-1576" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-07-24_153542_apostle-islands.jpg" id="image-1575" class="picwide" />
+
+We would probably have lingered in the Lake Superior area longer, but unlike last year's completely open-ended travels, this year we have an appointment to keep. We must be in Dallas by September 26th and we needed to pass through South Dakota on our way. Eventually we packed it up, took a last look at Lake Superior as we drove down the Minnesota coast, and then headed west, away from the water, the forest, the rock, the water, the weather and the life of Lake Superior.
+
+[^1]: Environmental historian is an interesting term, it implies, correctly I'd argue, that our conception of history is so woefully incompletely we neglect to even include the environment in our reckoning of it. It's no wonder we completely fail to understand the past in any meaningful way -- we can't even construct a reasonably complete story of it.
+[^2]: Cronon, William. “The Riddle of the Apostle Islands: How do you manage a wilderness full of human stories?” Orion May-June 2003: 36-42
+[^3]: But what about the internet? I give it a maybe. Future generations can decide that one.
diff --git a/sketches/2018-07-01_forest-service.txt b/sketches/2018-07-01_forest-service.txt
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/sketches/2018-07-01_forest-service.txt
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+I got to talking with a ranger this morning at the Grand Sable Lake overlook, which has the best cellphone signal around. I needed to check on some work stuff, but I ended up chatting with the ranger, who shall remain nameless, for some time. 
+
+He came over to ask about the Volvo, we talked some about Volvos and cars that run forever. He was a fan of Toyota vans from the late 1980s, the kind that I always thought looked like an oversized jelly bean. He was a westerner, looked a bit like Edward Abbey, long hair, long beard, long time in the sun.
+
+He was originally a back country ranger, a trail ranger with thirty years experience. Someone used to spending a week at a time in the back country of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, even Alaska one year. Some used to being surrounded by the natural world. Now he's emptying trash cans and stocking toilet paper in Michigan. According to him that's because all the hiring for the forest service (including National Parks, BLM, Forest Service, etc) has been centralized. You're no longer hired by the people you'll be working under, the regional and district manager, who actually know what needs to be done in their area.
+
+Instead all hiring is more or less like standardized testing. You get a score based on some inscrutable categories and series of questions and then you get assigned to some job, pretty much, again, according to him, irrespective of your experience. It sounded about like the kind of screwed up system you'd expect a bunch of Washington bureaucrats to come up with. He never got specific about what he thought kept him from the jobs he wanted, the jobs he used to have, but my guess would be that he lacks the experience gaming a system like that that younger applicants -- who've been wading through bureaucracies all their lives -- mostly likely have.
+
+The ranger had long hair, a long beard, smoked hand rolled cigarettes, and seemed to like nothing more than getting out there, way out there. Not off the grid, off the whole damn map. I used to like nothing better myself, but it's getting increasingly hard to do that, let alone do it and get paid for it. 
+
+Modern American culture has no room for individuals, however much lip service it loves to pay them. The reality is you need to buy in hook, line, and sinker or you'll see that the whole thing is a house of cards ready to tumble down. The minute too many people see that, down it goes. 
+
+America has always had a no compromise attitude toward people who wanted to go their own way, and for good reason, the only thing that sustains the farce is making sure no one calls it out. 
+
+This country has a long history of hunting down and killing individuals who flipped the finger to the farce and dared to live on their own terms. Geronimo, Cochise, Captain Jack, Ocsen Tustenuggee, or pretty much any other tribal leader who dared stand their ground against the U.S. government. See Howard Zinn, et al for non-Tribal examples -- there are plenty.
+
+This is why the west is, historically, very anti-federal government -- they've already seen what the federal government does to people who go against its wishes. Never mind the irony that the same people who now fear the feds are probably the same ones who would have cheered the government rounding up tribes. To be fair though, things are never so simple as good and bad. Life is complex, messy and gray, not black and white.
+
+None of that came up directly in the course of talking to the ranger. I sat their staring out at the lake after he left, considering what he'd said. There's a happy ending though, I talked to him several more times in the course of our two weeks here and on the last day we were there I ran into him again at Grand Sable overlook and he told me he'd been offered a full time position finally. It was not in the  backcountry, since those are mostly seasonal jobs, but it was at least full time with benefits, and perhaps more importantly, it was out west, in Washington.