By the time we left the park it was after noon, and nearby
Fish Harbor was simmering with Memorial Weekend vacationers. We crossed the
peninsula to the “quiet side,” negotiating a major roadblock and following
several back-country detours to avoid Jacksonport’s Maifest. The festival might
have been fun, but we were on our way to The Ridges Sanctuary in Bailey’s Harbor.
Here the dunes of Lake Michigan rise in a regular procession, and each brow
further inland, as heavily wooded as the last, nourishes a different set of
orchids and other plants.
We’d been there before, though I had no recollection of
where it was located. I took a right turn on Ridges Road (makes sense?) and we
followed it out along the shore to Tofts Point, where the road dead-ends.
Wrong road.
We hiked out to Toft’s Point itself, where quite a few
Caspian terns were bracing themselves against a stiff wind coming in from the
southeast across the vast open lake. The shoreline consisted of very flat slabs
of limestone (I presume) covered here and there with a slurry of sandy muck
that supported a smattering of grasses and stunted evergreens. If I had been
taken there blindfolded I might guess I was standing on the shore of Hudson’s
Bay.
Also growing in patches across the rocks were dwarf lake
iris (evidently uncommon) and some sort of arctic phlox.
Back in the car, we returned to the highway and continued
north, where we soon came to the Ridges, chatted with the man in the gift shop,
and took a long walk down the cedar-covered humps that are the ancient dunes.
We enjoyed it, though the only bird we saw was a great-crested flycatcher that
flew out into the open above one of the sloughs dividing the ridges, posed for
twenty seconds on a dead branch, then vanished again into the underbrush.
The only thing we saw blooming during our walk was trailing
arbutus. “It’s been a late spring,” the man had told us at the shop,
apologetically. But we already knew that. In short, the Ridges was a bit of
exercise and fresh air, but also a dud.
Continuing north, we breezed through Sister Bay, which has
some of the unbridled development that gives Door County a bad name, Ellison
Bay (nicer) and Gills Rock, before arriving at the pier where the ferry departs
for Washington Island. We bought tickets and got in line to wait for the 4
o’clock transit.
Another ethical dilemma: I bought tickets for a car and two
passengers. But we had two bikes strapped to the back of the car. Should we
have paid the additional $16 dollars to bring those bikes to the island and
back?
It’s a half-hour trip, and during that time Hilary struck up
a conversation with a woman who, like us, wore a pair of binoculars around her
neck. She told us about the crested caracara that had been sighted on
Washington Island. That’s a bird that rarely ventures farther north than
Oklahoma.
We got to talking about other sightings, and when I
mentioned the black-throated blue warbler, she, too, was curious. “Where did
you see it?” she wanted to know. (It might still be there.) We told her, and
then I mentioned the blue-winged warbler we see every spring along the same
back road in Forestville State Park, in southeastern Minnesota. Then she told
us about the pine warbler she sees every spring in a tree by the ferry
landing.
“I haven’t seen a pine warbler in years,” I said.
“Well, they aren’t
common,” she replied reassuringly.
It was clear we weren’t chatting with an ordinary birder.
The woman was an expert, a researcher, writing a book about the rough-legged
hawk. She was headed to the island to lead a birding event. Her name was Sandy
Petersen. She lives in Madison. Though she was a little secretive about her
background, she knew an awful lot about recent controversies regarding the
little islands we passed our way to Detroit Harbor. And she told us where we
were most likely to see the caracara. She emphasized how important the wind direction
was in determining where birds were most likely to be found on any given day. We
learned later from folks on the island that she’d been the naturalist there for
seventeen years.
We spent the next day and a half on Washington Island—just
to see what is was like. The island is roughly 6 miles square, and you could
probably drive all of the major roads that crisscross the island in an hour.
There’s a harbor in the southwest where the ferry arrives, and a smaller one in
the north east, where a smaller ferry takes visitors out to nearby Rock
Island—now a state park with a lighthouse at the far end, closed to all vehicular
traffic. The only town, Washington, is basically a collection of
widely-scattered businesses stretched out for half a mile along Main Road,
which runs north-south through the western third of the island.
Much of the island’s interior is given over to farms of one
kind or another. Wheat was big for a few years, during an organic beer phase; a
generation ago it was potatoes. Now lavender is making a run. There’s a horse
farm that specializes in Scandinavian breeds. And a few fishermen still set
their nets and bring in a catch daily. You can order fresh-caught whitefish or
“lawyers” (eelpout) at local restaurants.
We had eelpout for lunch at KK Fiske’s, where the waitress—the
owner’s niece—told us all about the local fishing industry. It didn’t take
long.
There was no one else in the café to keep the young woman
busy, and Hilary said, by way of conversation “I suppose it will be getting pretty
busy this weekend.”
“Oh, it’ll pick up a little bit, but it doesn’t really get
busy until the end of June, when the old-folks start arriving by the busload.”
“People like us,” I laughed.
“God, no,” she replied. "I mean OLD. We get two kinds of people.
We call them the newlyweds and the nearly-deads.”
Earlier in the day we’d gotten a latte at the Red Cup Coffee
House, packed with newly-arrived summer residents catching up on the news and exchanging
tales about winter damage to their cottages and houses. From there we stopped
in at the beautiful Stavkirke, a full-sized replica of a medieval Norwegian church
tucked into the woods amid the daffodils, alongside a Nature Conservancy parcel.
But much of Washington Island’s interior—fields or woods—is pleasantly
nondescript. For tourists like us, the chief sights, aside from the stave
church, are the curious Jacobsen Historical Museum, Jackson Harbor (with its
marine museum), Schoolhouse Beach (with its stunning white rocks), and the
local craft shop (with its subtle rag rugs and Cherokee baskets).
We visited them all, and we still had plenty of time to sit
around in Adirondack chairs at the Sunset Resort where we were staying, staring
out at Green Bay as the sun dropped toward the horizon. The air temperature was
perfect. Some gulls squawk at one another as they fly back and forth from the
low-slung islands extending northward from the tip of Figenschau Bay.
A slight breeze. Two foreign flags flapping—a blue cross on
red, and a red cross on blue. I suppose I ought to know what they are but I don’t.
Many of Washington Island’s first European settlers were Icelandic. That might
be a good first guess?
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