More from Door

To long-term residents every town on the Door County coast is rife with marks of character, no doubt, but a newcomer like me can only marvel at how varied and distinctive the names are.  On the west side of the peninsula, Egg Harbor could easily have been named by Mother Goose, or L. Frank Baum at the very least. Juddville pays homage to those simple rural types who could just as well hail from Kentucky as from the shores of Lake Michigan. 

Fish Creek carries the sound (and smell) of serious small-scale piscatorial endeavor, and Ephraim provides the Biblical rectitude that keeps a community alive from generation to generation. (The somewhat closed-in, New England flavor of the architecture reinforces that impression.) 

Sister Bay conjures a breezy summer line of clothing from J. Jill, and the town itself is open to both the fields and the sky. (Also worth noting,  its street and sidewalk construction are more modern than those of its neighbors.) 

Gill's Rock is a masterpiece of allusion. Who is Gill: first name or last name? It conjures images of fish guts on a rock, perhaps being eaten by gulls. "Gull's Rock" would sound terribly mundane in comparison.

Ellison Bay and Northport don't maintain quite the same level of poetic variety and interest, but it was a good run all the same.

I drove up to Northport on my second day in the county and bought some smoked fish at Charlie's Smokehouse. Then I headed down County NP to a little parking lot in a field by the edge of the woods. The sign said Mink River Estuary. I took a walk through the woods.

Pristine Great Lakes estuaries are few and far behind, which explains why the Nature Conservancy owns most of the land surrounding this one.

I had marveled the previous day that the dead leaves of the ironwood trees, generally strewn across the semi-open woods at eye level, looked paler and fatter than they do in Minnesota. But now, as I got close to them for the first time, I realized that they were actually the dead leaves of beech trees, a species that doesn't grow in Minnesota. In fact, I was walking down a very wide path through a spacious hemlock-beech forest.

After fifteen minutes of walking under gray skies I reached the estuary, a reed-lined watercourse maybe a hundred feet across. A large flock of scaup began to drift off downstream as I approached the water's edge. This would be a good place to visit in a canoe, I thought. Rent a canoe at Rawley's Resort. Nothing to it.  

I never made it to Rawley's, but a few days later I took a hike in the northern stretches of Newport State Park, on the advice of one of the rangers there. It was a nice hike, though the flat limestone geology of the Niagara Escarpment rising from the green, green waters of Lake Michigan will always seem slightly undramatic, if not downright mucky, to anyone who's spent some time amid the steely blue waters and imposing cliffs of Lake Superior's North Shore. (Yet this is a shallow, mucky judgment itself. We must always make an effort to see what a thing or an environment is, rather than what it isn't.)

The highlight of the walk, in any case, came during my return through the woods, when I spotted a strange bird crossing the boardwalk in a boggy stretch of woods a hundred feet in front of me.  At first I thought it was a very fat robin holding a very stiff worm in its beak. (Thus do we bend our sensations to resemble the things we know.) Then it occurred to me that I was looking at a snipe. And he was doing a little dance as he crossed the boardwalk—a rumba combined with a tail shimmy.

It took him ten minutes to walk ten feet, and I watched him the whole time. Once he'd dropped down off the boardwalk into the bog on the other side, I approached slowly, trying to catch sight of him before he flushed, but he flew off into the deep woods when I was ten feet away. I saw the golden feathers on his back as he took off, but no other bird flushed. He had been alone, practicing his strut.

Only later, after examining YouTube videos, did I determine that I had actually been watching a woodcock rather than a snipe. Well, these are not birds I get a good look at every day.

On my way back to the writing center I stopped for coffee and a sandwich at a place in Sister Bay called Base Camp. It's located in the basement of a deconsecrated church. Nice vibe. 

While I was waiting for my vegan hummus sandwich (which I ordered due to the roasted peppers) the young woman who had taken my order got to chatting. She had lived in Morocco with her grandparents for a while, and they had inspired her to read widely and to travel widely. She'd moved to Sister Bay recently from Madison to escape a stressful bank job and hang out with her boyfriend, who runs an organic farm nearby that supplies all the greens to Base Camp, as well as the fresh tomatoes to a nearby pizza place called Wild Tomato.   

That evening I took a drive through Peninsula State Park. The weather was brighter, but still gray. I didn't pass a single car in the park, only a woman walking hurriedly along the roadside.

I saw six deer, and behind the pottery studio up on Highway 42 I watched a sharp-shinned hawk dive in and nab a sparrow, while two others escaped.