Recently I produced an edition of stamped covers in the tradition of polar postal history (specifically expedition covers and paquebots) to commemorate the expedition training activities I’ve been conducting in the Great Lakes on Kelleys Island. I want to talk today about the design process and mention some of the observations I made about the contemporary postal handling of philatelic mail. At some point, I’ll produce a more formal analysis, and I’ve already produced a 220-page document outlining the traces of postal handling on each cover, as well as a taxonomy of auxiliary markings and USPS processing mistakes, but today I’m just introducing these covers and mentioning briefly the types of damage they’ve received.

…while I was building the map of the quarry and entering the locations of these 542 glacial stones in my database, I couldn't help but imagine what will happen to these geologically classified "hard-rock" stones during the next glaciation, when they are picked up and pushed across the soft sedimentary limestone landscape again.

Kelleys Island is known for a series of glacial grooves that were formed by these very stones that are scattered across the island, and historic photos of the island show that many of these quarried areas actually had massive glacial grooves carved in the limestone that was quarried away for gravel and building materials.

While searching maps and imagery of the Great Lakes, I found a quarry in Rockport, Michigan on Lake Huron that looks similar to the quarry on Kelleys Island in Lake Erie. So I took a trip to compare the landscapes and ground-truth some of my suspicions. It turns out they’re both limestone quarries and I discovered that there’s a surprising twist to the story I’m uncovering as I map the decision making strategies of quarry workers handling glacial stones in limestone quarries.

As I’ve embarked on planning an expedition to Baffin Island to see the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and I’ve begun my local research on how that ice sheet shaped Kelleys Island and the Great Lakes Region, I’ve drawn on a historic communication tool for expeditions in the past: hand-written mail. I’ve looked at letters, but I’ve also looked at postcards, QSL cards, and cachet envelopes. In this post I’ll write a little about how some of these have influenced my communication strategy, and why. (nb: later posts that relate to postal and philatelic interests will be categorized as “mail & stamps”)

Over the years I’ve found it puzzling that there are so many glacial erratics in the abandoned limestone quarries on Kelleys Island. Many of these erratics are granite, but tillite, quartzite, diorite, gabbro, gneiss are also found, among others. If you knew nothing about rocks, these erratics would stand out to you because the colors of these stones contrast with the consistent gray of the limestone bedrock in the quarry. The pink stone in the image above is an erratic, the gray stones filling the foreground are pieces of local limestone broken up during quarrying. The color contrast is an immediate clue. What puzzles me is why these stones were not removed during quarrying operations.

The understory is green and full, but the canopy has not shown up yet. When I climbed down into the quarry I was surprised to see the quarry floor in bloom with the lakeside daisy (Hymenoxys herbacea), which I had never seen in bloom. This species of daisy thrives in landscapes where other plants cannot grow, so the barren landscape of an empty quarry is perfect for this plant.

In seven days I could write a postcard to you personally from my field office on Kelleys Island, using blue ink & stamps wetted with meltwater from the post-glacial Great Lakes formed ~20,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum (I'm siphoning up that water in Lake Erie about 8 miles south of Canada).

As I said earlier, I've already begun sending postcards to the archive for my project at the Nevada Museum of Art on scouting trips I took to Kelleys Island earlier this year. And as long as you order before I board the ferry next week, you will start receiving hand-scribbled (but legible) postcards addressed to you.

As I embark on projects with longer timelines, the way I distribute my work is evolving. I need a new way to communicate the work, and I want it to be more personal than an email or a social media post. At the same time, I need a way to share the parts of my practice that I enjoy most: the experience of an evolving process, the buildup of a story, the details that accumulate until an actual object manifests in the real world. These parts of a practice are hard to own, but they are easy to commemorate.

Looking at this picture, my body remembers the weight of the air. I was working in Papua New Guinea on an ethnographic research project in 2000 or 2001, and after walking three days through the jungle, we came to this clearing. To this day even my lungs have a memory of the humidity…