Death's Door -- a Ramble in Wisconsin

　





　

　

　

　
Porte des Mortes is the name given by French explorers to the northern tip of Wisconsin’s Door peninsula. More precisely "Death’s Door" refers to a turbulent strait in Lake Michigan between the top of the 80 mile-long thumb of the peninsula and four islands crowding about that land’s end. The largest of these islands, Washington, is about five miles from the peninsula shore, but there are other smaller islets and hidden shoals as well. Some accounts claim that the strait contains the most submerged shipwrecks found in fresh-water anywhere in the world. Who knows if this is true?

Porte des Mortes appears on French charts of Lake Michigan as early as 1728. Various conjectures exist as to the meaning of the name. Some writers say that the French were eager to frighten their English competitors in the fur trade away from the Door Peninsula and, therefore, gave a grim place-name to its northern point. Others claim that large numbers of skeletons were found in the shifting dunes on the cape and that bones continued to be unearthed by wind and wave until the middle of the 19^th century. (The problem with this story is that I found no dunes of any kind on the headland – the shore are rock-girt and the small inlets end in swamp not sand.) Of course, if there are skeletons, there must be a reason for them and this has led to various stories, all equally unattested.

One narrative involves a desperate battle between the Potawatomi and the Winnebagos. According to this account, the Potawatomi were much harrassed by the Illinois and, so, they fled up the spine of the peninsula to its northernmost point, there establishing some villages and, even, crossing the dangerous strait in their canoes to set up fortifications on what is now Washington Island. A group of Winnebago warriors, said to number 500, decided to attack the island where the Potawatomi were living. Here is where the story becomes confusing with many variants. In some accounts, the Winnebago reached the island where there was a pitched battle, resulting in their retreat. As they canoed back across the strait, a storm caught them in the passage and their frail birch-bark vessels were hurled against the rocks with much loss of life. Another account reverses the casualties and tells us that the Potawatomi, after repelling the Winnebago attack, took to the lake in a flotilla of canoes, pursuing the defeated enemy across the strait. The Winnebago (now Ho-Chunk) reached the tip of the peninsula and set misleading bonfires, luring the Potawatomi through the darkness to rocky reefs where their canoes were wrecked. Another story asserts that the Potawatomi reached the rocky terrace beneath the higher limestone bluffs on the point. On the terrace, the Potawatomi and Winnebago were engaged in ferocious hand-to-hand combat when a rogue wave spilled up over the low rocky shelf sweeping the warriors out into the icy strait. An ill-fated encampment on the lake ice is another story about a large number of deaths by drowning and the deposition of skeletal remains along the stony coastline. Historians observe that similar stories are told about a stony point in Lake Winnebago about 50 miles south-west of Green Bay. Indeed, in the collection of interconnected lakes called the Lake Winnebago Pool (a remnant of the glacial great lake called Oshkosh), there is a lake named Butte des Mortes (Butte of the Dead) – perhaps, this is where the Potawatomi and the Winnebago fought their fatal battle.

Driving on the serpentine and narrow roads on the north end of the peninsula, I found myself approaching a long queue of cars and Rvs waiting for the ferry to cross Death Door’s strait to Washington Island. It was bright and the sun glinted on the waiting vehicles and, of course, I didn’t want to find myself trapped in that line and, so, I pulled off the road, turning onto a one-lane oiled dirt alley called "Porte des Mortes". This seemed a very remote place, but, along the four-hundred yards of the lane there were a dozen or more summer cabins, some of them large houses, concealed in the pines and birch tree woods. This is true of the entire Door Peninsula – you are never more than a stone’s throw away from a golf course or a tourist emporium selling cherry preserves or someone’s mansion looming overhead on a rocky bluff.

　

　

"That’s poison ivy" a woman said. She pointed to some greasy-looking leafy plants along the trail. The plants looked to me like small deciduous saplings. Maple and oak trees lined the path. "That’s poison ivy for sure," the woman said.

Like most people, I’ve had my brush with the plant. Nothing extraordinary, just experiencing a bout of severe woods diarrhea, the kind of gastro-intestinal complaint that can attack you suddenly on a shady, forested trail – deep woods diarrhea drives you into the brush where voracious mosquitos form a grey halo around your sweaty brow and, of course, you end up wiping your ass with a bouquet of poison ivy. This results in misery and, of course, the only way to counter misery is to mask the pain with pleasure and, so, invariably, you end up masturbating with toxic hand and, thus, spreading the ivy to your genitals. From there, the poison takes root in your system and, before you know it, you can taste the deadly vines in your tongue tickling your inflamed soft palate.

"Leaves of three — ...something. I guess I don’t know the rest of the rhyme.

I thought to myself: if I am seized by deep woods diarrhea here, I will have to shit on a log and, then, hike with ass unwiped to the nearest outhouse.

But, fortunately, this calamity did not befall me.

　

　

The week before I traveled with my wife, Julie to Door County, I was sitting on my porch reading a novel. It was a Sunday evening, reasonably cool, with a refreshing breeze, and my dog, Frieda, an old Labrador retriever, was sitting on the steps a few yards away, watching the cars pass and the people strolling on the sidewalk without too much interest. Sometimes, she would rouse herself to a desultory bark at a bicyclist or pedestrian or a squirrel prancing in the boulevard, but this didn’t bother me. Dogs are made to bark.

I was engrossed in my novel and, for a time, didn’t really notice the strange sound throbbing a little in the air. But when the dog barked and I looked up from the book, I attended to the noise that hitherto been just a background sound, something in the air to which I was not really listening. Nearby, a woman was sobbing. She was crying inconsolably and without respite. Sometimes, she took a deep breath and hiccupped a little before continuing her lament. It was a heartbreaking sound and I was amazed that I had not paid any attention to it earlier.

At first, I thought something had distressed my daughter, Angelica, and wondered if she was not the woman weeping. But, when I went inside to look for her, I discovered that she had gone upstairs to take a bath and was in a cheerful mood. My wife was reading a detective novel in the bedroom and she was not distressed at all.

I went back on the porch and listened to the woman crying. The sound continued for twenty minutes. I walked around the house and paced up and down the alley. The crying didn’t really seem localized to any one place. It was all around me: la Llorona – the weeping woman. The experience was a little eerie, but, after a time, the crying stopped and, then, it was pale blue twilight all around with mosquitos humming in the air and so I went inside.

　

　

As an overview: The Door peninsula is hinged to the mainland at Green Bay, Wisconsin and extends about 80 miles north-by-northeast into Lake Michigan. The tongue of land becomes narrower as one travels farther north to the Death’s Door strait – at its base, the peninsula is about 25 miles wide; at its northern headlands, the cape is four or five miles across. About a third of the way between Green Bay and Porte des Mortes, the peninsula is split by Sturgeon Bay, a long fjord-like finger of lake that extends across the entire thumb of land, rendering the northern two-thirds of the peninsula, in effect, an island. Sturgeon Bay is Door’s county seat and the largest village on the peninsula.

The eastern flank of the peninsula slopes slowly down to sand beaches, marshland, or low cliffs about 12 to 15 feet high, deeply undercut by waves – for instance, the sea caves at Cave Point. From east to west, the cross-section of the peninsula is a cuesta – that is, a landform that slopes gradually upward to an escarpment. In this case, the escarpment is about 150 to 250 feet high, a pale limestone cliff running the length of the peninsula parallel to its western edge. This rocky spine is part of the so-called Niagara Escarpment, a landform left by glaciation in the region and extending across the great lakes through Michigan and New York – the waterfall of the same name plunges off this escarpment in northern New York.

On the western shoreline of the peninsula, the landscape is mildly dramatic – there are no real thrills to be had on the Door Peninsula. The height of land runs along the coast, sometimes towering directly over the waters of Green Bay, in other locations, about a mile inland. This gives rise to several ways for wealthy people to show their pride and opulence. In some places, huge gleaming mansions crown the cliff, looking down over the littoral woods where other mansions, equally huge and gleaming with great windows, face the water itself resting on the coast ledge only about ten or fifteen feet above the lake. A shoreline road runs between the mansions lining the cliffside, a half mile inland, and the mansions built on the shore itself where the waves of Green Bay smash against long white piers where sailboats are uneasily riding the surge. According to your temperament, here you can show off by occupying a prime tract of lakeshore or, in the alternative, building your viewing decks and belvederes atop the cliff to enjoy a prospect over the waves of the bay.

The eastern shoreline is more moderate. Here the rise and fall of the lake has left ancient dunes, ridges that run parallel to the water, rising about forty or fifty feet high. On the lake itself, there are exposed dunes, some of them crowned with grass, each about forty feet high. As you hike inland from the lake, the dunes become increasing wooded. The woods drops leaves and pine needles and other organic material building up a thin layer of soil that supports thorny plants, thistles, and gaunt-looking grasses. The depth of soil increases as you progress away from the water and the ramp-like center of the peninsula has sufficient soil to support a few isolated cornfields, dense groves of forest, and, on the west side of the cape, vast cherry and apple orchards. It is slightly warmer on the west side of the peninsula and, of course, the peninsula itself, surrounded on three-sides by water, is conspicuously warmer than the mainland. For this reason, Door County produces large quantities of grapes for making wine – the region is part of the Niagara Escarpment AVA (American Viticultural Area). By my observations, the cherry orchards and the raspberry and strawberry farms are all east of the center of the peninsula located on the incline rising to the escarpment and, therefore, on east-facing hillsides.

Along the western edge of the peninsula, the escarpment runs very close to the lakeshore and, therefore, the villages are all set like gems within rounded harbors carved into the rocky highlands. The roads running north and south, climb up out of the harbors onto the top of the escarpment, running along the heights for a few miles, before then dipping sharply downward to where the villages line the stony amphitheaters of inlets. On the eastern shoreline, the land simply tilts without protest down into the lake where lawns end with docks stretched into the lake gently lapping against its sandy shores.

　

　

　

Some tweets led me into a debate about White privilege. Whenever I think hard and long about White privilege, I feel the need to play miniature golf. It would be well to claim that I read Martin Luther King’s "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" or Frantz Fanon or that I do something for social justice and equality when I think about this subject. But, instead, I simply feel an urge to play miniature golf.

On the headland above Sister Bay, Pirate’s Cove features skull-and-crossbones flags whipping in the wind, the rigging of a pirate ship mounted atop a concrete reef, and 18 green-carpeted holes set amidst rushing sluices, streams of water hurtling down concrete channels and a half-dozen six-foot waterfalls, white as wolf-fangs on the artificial hillside. It had rained the night before on Pirate’s Cove and some of the green carpet was soaked, even decorated with standing water through which my orange-painted golf ball hissed and danced, casting up a little flourish of spray before dropping into the cup. Walking carefully to avoid a fall on the slick, wet green carpet, I approached the cup. Now: how to get the orange ball out of the six-inch deep round hole in the putting green? I bent my knees and stooped and, yet, was too inflexible to take hold of the ball with my fingers. Blood rushed to my head. I bent lower and squatted more deeply, except of course, my knees don’t really work anymore and, I thought to myself, this is a fine kettle of fish (or a Door County "fish boil") – there are 18 holes here and I can’t figure out how to get my ball out of them. I propped myself with the putter and bent as low as I could and the tips of my fingers scraped along the top of the ball – at last, I got some traction and popped the ball up onto the green where it rolled sideways and splashed into the running stream outlining the edge of the hole. The ball floated in the water but was seized by the current and hustled down the concrete flume. Now, I had to squat to not only seize the ball but also keep it from being propelled under a walkway crossing the stream. I used my putter to block the ball and, even, tried to putt it upstream, but this failed. I dropped to one knee and was immediately pained by the impact – I have no cartilage and only a thin sinew of old skin over the joint and it is intensely painful for me to kneel. Somehow, I caught hold of the ball and knocked it up onto the green where it obligingly dropped back down into the cup. How to get it out of the cup?

When I walk my dog, of course, as a good citizen, I carry a plastic sack so that I can pick up the dog excrement. Usually, I lead my dog to the curbside so that I can stand in the gutter and, therefore, don’t have to reach down to the level of grass except from a position with my feet eight inches below the feces. This makes scooping up the dog shit easier for me. And I can reach down to the grade to pick up the dog’s droppings if I have to do so – although my head fills up with blood when I maneuver in this way and I feel a little dizzy. But the miniature golf course is a different matter – I have to stoop so low as to reach below grade, at least four inches below grade and this makes all the difference.

A slight drizzle filled the air. I was the first player on the course at Pirate’s Cove. Despite the voluptuous waterfalls and the caves in the rock terrace where the pirate ship had foundered, most of the holes were pretty standard stuff. There wasn’t any place where I had to shoot through a waterfall although one hole was in a kind of concrete niche or grotto under the rigging of the pirate ship. There wasn’t even a minature windmill with a mousehole through which you have to shoot while avoiding the spinning rotors. On the back nine, I had two holes in one, but my score on the par 38 course was 52 – that is, 12 over par.

When my brother Christopher was diagnosed with ALS, he told me something that haunts my imagination. "Four inches can be like Mount Everest," he said. "You should write a story about the difference four inches makes."

　

　

Goats on the roof is the gimmick that draws tourists to Al Johnson’s restaurant and "butik" at Sister Bay. The place is a Swedish-themed café, very large to accommodate the vast numbers of people attracted by the goats. It’s a gimmick of ineluctable genius, so simple and obvious as to be almost beyond commentary. The restaurant is built in U-shape along the sidewalk and curb at Highway 42, the main north-south thoroughfare in this part of the peninsula and the cafe’s signature goats can be clearly observed from the road. Sister Bay occupies a hollow between steep bluffs and the marina is across the highway from the restaurant, a forest of sailboat masts and white vessels bobbing on the waves between flimsy-looking piers extending into the lake. Johnson’s restaurant has a roof that gently slopes to a point. The roof is green with thick grass and the goats, generally, stand at the roof’s peak, close to the front of the building and it’s main door. The goats seem contented, usually three of them, two resting on their bellies on the point of the building where the roof cantilevers out over the sidewalk, a third standing upright and grazing in the grass. Johnson didn’t even think up the gag that’s made him and his family millionaires. A couple of his drinking buddies, apparently, hoisted the goats up on the roof in 1973 as a practical joke – in those days, there was no sod on the building. Tourists sighted the goats inexplicably atop the building and swarmed around the little restaurant, much smaller in those days, and, after that, Johnson expanded, had his gently sloping roof covered in sod and acquired six goats to ride the roof in shifts of three. A movie-star handsome goatherd leads the animals up some hidden stairs in the morning, distributes them between the gables, and, then, descends into the restaurant. It it’s stormy or cold or hotter than 85 degrees (there’s no shade up on the roof), the goats stay in their hutches behind the building.

The place is open for breakfast all day long and by 10:00 am, it’s a half-hour wait to sit down in the dining room. The place stays busy until 8:00 at night when the goats come down from their perch and the place closes. Julie and I couldn’t resist the lure of the goats and so we ate late lunch at the restaurant. The place has pickled herring with a bite, similar to the herring you can eat in Norway, and specializes in particularly dense and filling Swedish meatballs. In the Butik, you can buy goat-themed memorabilia – stuffed goats and books about goats and goatherds and goat key-chains and goat purses. People were buying this stuff in large quantities when we perused the Butik and Julie, in fact, bought two matching stuffed goats – for what purpose I do not know.

In Austin, someone should start a restaurant called the "Roadkill" café. Ten ravens should be kept nearby in hutches and perched on the crest of the roof each day – the ravens could eat carrion and left-overs. The restaurant would feature stews made from raccoon, porcupine, and venison. Pie would be served ala mode. Thousands of people would take exits into Austin, patronize our businesses, visit the Spam museum and eat at that the "Roadkill". (I tried to imagine a way to elevate piglets onto a roof but the shingles would have to be buried in garbage and pig excrement is powerfully aromatic – probably no way to implement this plan.)

　

　

The Door Bluff Headlands at the northwest tip of the peninsula is a wilderness park owned by the County. It’s the closest thing to uninhabited territory that I found on the peninsula. But, even, so, this little tract of undeveloped terrain, mostly very steep hillsides and cliffs, is surrounded by lakeshore cabins. Garbage was being collected by Going Waste Management on the day that I drove to the Door Bluff Headlands County Park and I was trapped behind the truck – it moved slowly ahead of me, stopping every hundred yards to use a mechanical arm to seize green waste barrels and tilt them upward into the big truck’s bin. The road was narrow, winding along the shore between driveways slipping down to the big shorefront houses, and I couldn’t pass the truck. It took me a half-hour to travel a mile to the entrance to the park.

The park is nondescript. A single loop road takes the visitor to a parking lot where there are supposedly trailheads, although I couldn’t find any clearly marked paths. Although the view is mostly shielded by tall old trees, the lot sits next to a high cliff. I skidded down some faint paths and found myself on a sloping hill that tilted steeply down to a cliff. The face of the cliff was invisible to me but I could see that the declivity dropped a long way to the tops of trees waggling this way and that in the strong winds whirling about the cape.

The hillside was steep and the path indistinct and I thought it would be a humiliating place for me to fall and either slide off the cliff or be impaled on the dead wood strewn around the edges of the precipice. So I dragged myself uphill and found the parking lot again, still empty except for my vehicle. I sat in the car with the windows down and inhaled the forest deeply and, then, as I was writing some notes, an old man and woman wearing projectile-shaped helmets appeared on bicycles, stopped to adjust their gear, and, then, after haling me, remounted their bikes and vanished down the narrow paved road winding through the tall trees.

　

　

　

Door County is Wisconsin’s Cape Cod. Both places are peninsulas extending into cold and stormy bodies of water. In both, traffic jams occur in the summer in small villages that would be quaint except for the huge numbers of tourists. Both places feature ostentatious mansions interspersed among worn-out looking and weathered tourist cottages. Each peninsula features a signature food – in Door County, everything is about eating cherries; on Cape Cod, you eat lobster roll. In general, the land forms in both places are uninspiring – on balance, the stony spine of escarpment running the length of Door County is a bit more impressive than the rolling hills and marshes of Cape Cod, although, as one approaches Provincetown and the tip of the cape, the Massachusetts peninsula offers vistas of turbulent sea, undulating sand dunes here and there adorned with small brackish lakes and wind-tormented groves of trees.

In both places, there is an abundance of poison ivy and great swarms of mosquitos and biting flies.

　

　

Each morning, when Julie left for her conference, I drove to a State Park (or, in some cases, a County Park), found a trail, and walked for an hour or so in the woods. Except for people employed on the peninsula, no one really stirs before 10:30 in the morning and, so, when I set forth, the roads were mostly empty and the intersections in the small villages not congested with traffic turning or almost motionless as the drivers searched for parking spaces. The curb side stalls were vacant. No one was sitting in the lawn chairs on the grass overlooking the vast lake. Far out along the horizon, a single sail boat with bare mast drifted against the lustrous morning clouds.

I listened to Wisconsin Public Radio as I drove across the peninsula, passing acres and acres of cherry orchards. New bright hex signs had been painted on the old barns. The radio played Wagner’s "Forest Murmurs," a bit of highly colored program music from Siegfried. Siegfried rests on a stony ledge near the grotto where Fafner, the dragon, hides. Birds, represented by flutes and double piccolo, sing in the tree tops. The young hero falls into "silent revery" while the birds adorn the silence with their liquid notes. Something intermittently bubbles and one of the birds signals to Siegfried the presence of Brunnhilde, comatose and surrounded by flickering magic fire, in another clearing in the great green and shadowy forest. The sword motif sounds and Siegfried rises from his revery and the road ahead of me, having crested the mild mid-peninsula height of land drops down to a causeway across Kangaroo Lake, the shoreline wreathed in pale-blue mist.

The trails are mostly the same. They tilt and dip into the woods. There is no one ahead of me, although, later, returning I encounter other hikers. The forest is deep and dark. But, then, ahead, the trees seem to thin-out and blue sky appears between them and, at last, there are low yellowish cliffs overhanging placid lake water. The birds trill in the treetops. There are no dragons in these woods and no sleeping Valkyries.

　

　

The phone message was dire: I was supposed to call immediately. I was standing in the parking lot at Al Johnson’s carrying a paper sack full of stuffed goats. It was already mid-afternoon. The lot was perilous with tourists backing and maneuvering their vehicles while other cars lurked nearby waiting to take each parking space as it was vacated.

Standing beside my car, I made the call. My heart was racing a little. It was as I expected, a close friend whom I had known for about forty-five years had been found dead. It was not clear when my friend had died. Neighbors complained about the smell and the police broke into the apartment and the corpse was found sprawled on the floor next to his bed. When last I saw my friend, about three weeks earlier, he had been drinking himself to death. His face was in tatters and he walked stooped over. The Tv in his apartment was tuned to a news network, CNN I think, but he couldn’t see the screen because his glasses were broken. There was no food of any kind in the house unless you counted the innumerable cans of malt liquor stacked in the kitchen. My friend had been hospitalized recently and, then, confined in a nursing home. He left the nursing home against doctor’s orders and went to his squalid apartment and there I saw him, probably only a few days before his death, alone and fearful that police would come on a "wellness" check and take him away, again, to the nursing home where, of course, he was forbidden any alcohol. I offered to go to the grocery store and buy him some food but he said no: "I’m not hungry," he said, "Anyway, I’ll take care of it later." I tried to persuade him to let me get his glasses fixed. "It doesn’t matter," he said. "I’m having trouble with my eyes." He said that one of the lenses in his shattered glasses was intact and that he was thinking of getting an eyepatch for the other eye. I think he was joking because he laughed a little.

My friend’s brother had called me. I said that I was very sorry. What else could I say.

I got into the car. A white goat was overhead, resting on the sod atop the café. The goat looked enigmatic, like the figurehead on a Viking boat. We drove up the hill and I batted at my eyes and, then, we stopped at a gem store. The shop was in a white-framed colonial building, a kind of disguised strip mall with birch trees growing in the boulevard. Julie went into the store. I made a few phone calls from my car informing people about my friend’s death. The sun came out from behind wet-looking clouds and it was hot. The procession of tourists driving down the two-lane highway was unending. It would be difficult to extricate myself from this parking lot. Bumper-to-bumper traffic lined the road running between the harbor resort-towns. At this time of day, it was like a great variegated parade without beginning and without end.

　

Ellison Bluff is located in a State Park on the peninsula. A road rises to the top of the escarpment and, then, you can look down onto a great, shimmering expanse of water from the two-hundred foot height. A catwalk takes you out over the face of the cliff. The catwalk is made of corrugated metal sheets and you can look down, between your shoes, to the tops of trees swaying in the lake-breeze below. It’s just a little bit frightening. I stood on metal walkway and looked down into the abyss and thought about my friend who had died – life is precarious.

I walked awhile in the woods near the overlook. The trail looped around the rocky hillside next to the cliff. Even at the most remote point on the trail, I could hear girls squealing as they stepped out onto the catwalk on the bluff, looked down, and saw that they were suspended on the cantilevered steel above the tops of the huge trees below.



　

　

Bjoerklunden is an estate on the eastern shore of the peninsula a little south of Baileys Harbor. The place was donated to the University of Wisconsin as a conference center. But no one was there on the morning that I visited.

A winding road crosses the ridges of some ancient, tree-studded dunes and, then, the traveler reaches a small parking lot concealed in the forest, a dumpster hidden in the shade at the lot’s edge, and, beyond another copse of trees a manicured, green lawn rolling like a carpet up the very edge of the blue-green water. In a nearby thicket, a sort of imitation Stavekirche ("Stave-church") looms among the trees and, then, a path curves into the woods to another clearing where some folding chairs are set on low risers. A wooden shack with a counter for concessions stands behind the risers and a couple of double-wide aquamarine portapotties are planted a few steps into the forest encircling the clearing.

A stage built like a redwood deck on the back of a suburban house rings the base of a big maple tree. A score of lanterns hang high above, dangling like earrings from the tree’s big boughs. On the deck some wooden steps lead to a sort of tree-house balcony also wrapped around the trunk of the majestic maple. You need a balcony for Shakespeare – after all, from time to time, your company must perform Romeo and Juliet. The grey chairs and the nondescript risers were empty. A glass display case of the type you used to see in front of old-style churches, white letters set like print on a black background announcing the title for this Sunday’s sermon, stood along the trail to the clearing. The display said that the show was A Comedy of Errors and announced the names of the actors.

It was quiet in the clearing except for forest murmurs. I took to the stage, climbed the steps, and stood on the balcony overlooking the bleacher-like seats. "I am but a poor player who struts and frets his time upon the stage and, then, is heard no more," I declaimed. My voice sounded paltry in the clearing, a weak and dishonest thing. I spoke louder, repeating the phrase: That was better, more forceful and, therefore, more truthful.

On the other side of the parking lot, a lawn scrolled out to the lake, I saw a manor house with many chimneys. The manor house had intricately mullioned windows and a grey slate roof. The whole place looked like the setting for one of Ingmar Bergman’s comedies, perhaps, his ineffable Smiles of a Summer Night. Birds sang and a lone seagull glided over the small, filigreed waves that the mild breeze made on the lake.

　

　

A plein-air painting contest was underway on the peninsula. Artists stood on points of land protruding into the lake and painted landscapes on little square canvases clipped to wooden tripods. The artists were all over the peninsula. Along the coast, they stood staring at the sea and, then, their canvases, daubing paint nervously onto the little pictures. Inland, you encountered them sketching the parallel rows of the cherry orchards, trees laden with fruit, or, at sunset, painting ruinous old barns. Sometimes, you found the painters in places that seemed wholly devoid of any charm – buggy marshes along stagnant lakes, streams that were more like sewage outlets, nasty stone-girt headlands where the winds blew perpetually among stunted trees.

One evening, returning from a seafood dinner in Baileys Harbor, we saw an army of painters, all ranged along the road, peering at the sun as it set between some birch trees beyond a wrecked silo. Some of the painters were working at the very edge of the roadway and I had to drive with caution to avoid crashing into a plein air painter.

A mile farther down the lane, we came to an accident. The crash had just happened. A passenger van was resting at an angle in a cow pasture and there was a big, sail boat set like a white coffin in the ditch next to the road. The ditch was elliptically shaped and the sail-boat occupied the entire indentation beside the highway, set snugly in the slot as if it had been intentionally placed there. A pickup truck had run down the embankment and was mired in the mud. A woman stood at the side of the road, distraught, her long braided hair swaying as she paced to and fro. A man, face blanched was talking on his cell-phone. The setting sun cast ambiguous light over the scene sending long fingers of shadow across the meadows.

I thought that one of the plein air painters should hasten to this place and make a canvas depicting this calamity.



　

　

In the early morning, at the tip of the Cape Cod promontory, I encountered a strange apparition: a man wearing tight hot-pink shorts came running out of the forest. The man was handsome, with a short neatly groomed beard, and he stuffed into shorts so tight that everything below his belt was visible. The man’s midriff was bare and he wore a kind of cut-off soccer teeth shirt over his breast. The man’s eyes were wild and he was making strange gestures with his hands, cutting the air around his head with karate-chops and punches. It was a fearful scene and I ducked to the side as the man plunged past me, leaving behind a powerful wake of cologne. Something in the woods had driven the poor fellow mad.

I had come to the National Seashore land at the very tip of the Cape and planned to hike around one of the small pot-hole lakes in the salmon-colored dunes near Race Point. The trail was very clearly marked and looped through the stand of small pines surrounding the marshy lake. Some birds were calling and it was early in the morning – the streets of Provincetown, through which I had just driven, were completely empty and parking places, all of which would vanish by noon, were abundant there.

The man had emerged, puffing and panting and flailing at the air, from the trail that I was about to take. I set forth into the woods, walking rapidly, and was immediately beset by swarms of mosquitos and black flies. My head was surrounded by a haze of stinging insects and, when I looked down at my forearms, the skin was dark with mosquitos crowding onto my flesh to take my blood. I hastened, advancing more rapidly – the trail was only a mile and a half and I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t complete the loop. But it was difficult. When I patted the top of my head, fifteen flies were crushed into my hair and a mosquito had lodged on my eyelid and puffed it up so that I was half-blind. No matter how fast I walked the biting bugs kept pace. At last, I emerged from the woods at the far side of the parking lot where my car was located – I was trotting and flailing my hands around my head and throat. A couple disembarking from their Volvo, unscrewing bicycles from the back of the car, looked at me curiously. I suppose they thought I had taken leave of my senses.

Something similar occurred to me at Newport State Park on the northeast tip of the Door Peninsula. I walked on a trail leading to a place called Lynd Point. After a couple hundred yards, I came to a place where the sun shone on a clearing made by a small wetland in the forest. Walkways made from wooden planks crossed the marsh and the air, suddenly, was dense and painful with stinging insects. I increased my pace, but the mosquitos glided into my ears and buzzed there and they crowned my bald spot on my head with welts. I began to trot, but still the bugs pursued me. After six-hundred or so yards so afflicted, the mosquitos lifted and I heard the cicadas screaming in the tree-tops. The trees thinned ahead of me and, then, opened onto a vista of the lake. At the point, the shore consisted of a limestone terrace, puddled where pools were full of lake-water. At points where low cliffs rose over the water, little battered blocks of limestone about four feet tall and drooping vines down into the blue still lake, I could hear the waves petite and gentle, thumping on the land like water in a bathtub. Some wind blew here and the bugs were deterred, I guess, from biting me.

After another half-mile, I emerged into a meadow sloping down to the lake. This is where the old lumber camp of Newport had once flourished. Pictures on a plaque showed some log cabins and, of course, the most instrumental part of the village, a great pier extending out into the lake. From time to time, storms tore down the pier and the last time this happened was coincident with the end of the big timber on the peninsula. The town lost its raison d’etre and fell into ruin. The meadow had a sad and deserted look and the remains of the buildings were nothing more than slumps in the grass where cellars had once been and some low mounds also covered in sod.

A man was being treated with Deep Woods Off. The man stood grimacing, every muscle tense, as his wife blasted his shoulders and kidneys and the backs of knees with the pesticide. She lifted the nozzle of the aerosol to the back of his neck and the man inhaled deeply as if she were burning him with an acetylene torch. The woman put down the bug spray and pointed to some weeds growing around a sign. "That’s poison ivy," she said. "It’s everywhere."

I looked at the weeds growing by the sign and saw that they were broadleaf plantains. "You have to watch out for that plant," she said. "It can really harm you."



　

　

Ravens have returned to Sven’s Bluff – that is the legend on sign marking a precipice in Peninsula State Park. The precipice is on the steep western escarpment and looks down to the lake 200 feet below, an expanse of water complicated by small, densely forested islands forming parenthesis marks in the grey-blue water. I stood at the overlook for a while and admired the view, but beauty is a finite thing in the imagination and, after a time, one tires of even the most spectacular perspective. Nature is easily worn out, at least, as an esthetic experience.

I walked a while in the woods. A fresh breeze kept the mosquitos from biting. The trail looped going nowhere in particular. The air in the woods smelled moldy in the shadows but was like bleach in the white, bright sunshine of the clearings. Poison ivy lapped up against the trees.

Later, after her conference session, I took Julie to a custard place, Not Licked Yet, in a hollow in Fish Creek next to the entrance to the State Park. A tiny stream danced down some rocks and extinquished its little white fire in the big lake. You ate the custard sitting at a picnic table next to the creek. The sign for the place was unsightly, a hideous adolescent with red hair and freckles extending an enormous tongue from between red, stretched labia.

After eating the custard, I drove with Julie up to the overlook at Sven’s Bluff. The tiny parking lot next to the explanatory sign was empty. Julie said that she hoped that she would see a raven. We stood silently for awhile looking over the tan, fissured cliffside. "If a raven appears," she said, "it will be your friend Kim." Kim was the person who had been found dead in his apartment.

No ravens appeared. It had become quite warm and there were no birds at all and no birdsong. I supposed the creatures were resting during the heat of the afternoon in hidden, cool nests. Julie used her cell-phone to take a picture of me. "Nothing," she said.



Rain fell overnight and the next morning was cold and stormy.

I drove down the peninsula to Sturgeon Bay, and, then, north a few miles to Potawatomi State Park. The park occupies a headland across Green Bay from the Door County peninsula.

Roads in the park divide into a Shoreline drive, curving along the base of the escarpment, and a Highlands road that climbs to the top of the cliff and, then, loops between overlooks. On the Shoreline Road, there is a turn-off to a vantage across the bay. About two or three miles away, across a strait braided with white-caps, a great scar marked the Niagara escarpment on the Door County coast. Pale limestone cliffs extended for a thousand yards along the opposite shore, denuded and hacked into canyons cut into the hillside. The big white slash was vivid along the otherwise green and densely wooded hillside. An explanatory sign said that this was the site of the so-called "Stone Boats" – old steam vessels re-purposed to haul dolomite from the hillside quarry. Most of the rock cut from the escarpment was shipped to Chicago where it was used to as building materials. The quarry was owned by Leathem and Smith and operated from the 1890's through the time leading up to America’s involvement in World War One – the harvest of dolomite ended in 1917. Across the bay, the escarpment overhung the water and so it was easy to access the cliffside, cut it open and extract the stone, and, then, ship it from piers extending into the lake. Of course, several of the stone-boats sank and they are said to rest in bay just beyond the pier cast out into the lake.

The Highlands road twists up, spiraling to the top of the big bluff running through the center of the park. At its western side, the land drops steeply but without actual cliffs descending toward rolling pastures, swamps, and, then, a complex landscape involuted with peninsulas from which smaller peninsulas jutted into the lake, even the small peninsulas thumbed with additional peninsulas and so on, an intricate fractal landscape where land and water were mixed inextricably. Next to the overlook above this watery terrain, a big sign announced the western terminus of the Ice Age Trail, a thousand mile ramble through moraines and drumlins and other glacial features that dot the Wisconsin landscape. I hiked along the Ice Age Trail for about a half mile, leaving the remaining 999 and one-half miles for another day. It was another walk in the woods, a broad path between big, old trees with little undergrowth, the forest floor littered with thick drifts of red pine needles. Roots protruded from the trail and, if you weren’t careful, you might stub your toe on them.

Returning to the parking lot, I saw two older women perusing the sign at the overlook – there had once been an old ski-jump here. They walked across the asphalt lot to the big marker where the Ice Age Trail ends. One of the women took off her sunglasses and pointed to a garland of shiny-looking broad-leaf weeds growing around the base of the sign.

"Poison ivy," the woman said.

Her companion approached and gingerly kicked at the weeds with her toe. "No, it’s some kind of clover or mint," the other woman said.

Then, she stooped plucked off a leaf and, standing up, put it between her lips, chewing the green into pulp and, then, spitting out.

"You’re pretty sure of yourself," her friend said.

"Maybe, I made a mistake," the other woman said, grimacing a little.

　

　

Back in Sturgeon Bay, I found a queue of cars waiting at a draw-bridge. A few days earlier, we had encountered something similar at the other bridge crossing the fjord cut through the peninsula in that town. The road-bed on the bridge tilted up like praying hands and, then, two sail-boats passed under the bridge, drifting idly across the calm water inside the harbor. I looked at my cell-phone watch. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon, around the same time that the other drawbridge in the harbor had been raised the day that we drove through Sturgeon Bay on the way to the resort. The bridge deck tilted back into place and, then, I drove across, taking the shoreline drive up the peninsula to the big quarry that I had seen across the water from Potawatomi State Park.

Today, the quarry site is called George K. Pilney County Park. Most notably, the place is a big boat launch where ships can be put into the bay in a protected area between a long, stone pier and a breakwater made from cow-sized boulders. I walked out on the pier. Big waves were smashing against the boulders and hurling spray onto the sidewalk. White-caps speckled the bay and heavy, dark clouds scudded by overhead. A big white yacht came tentatively across the waves, jerking and bouncing with the surge, and, then, glided across the smooth water in the protected inlet. I found a perch lying dead on the pier atop the sidewalk, a little fish with gills wide open so that it looked hollow. The waves were crashing violently into the pier.

As I looked up the coast, I saw that the water was very high and that the lake had flooded the woods lining the shoreline. The waves were smashing into tree-trunks and the white-caps were blown inland, distressed water hopping and splashing as it surged in long rolling waves through the edge of the forest. It was a startling thing to see: the lake invading the land and I wondered what it would be like to walk on a path in that forest and, suddenly, come upon a place, all overshadowed by great green trees where white-capped waves were smashing against the trunks of the birch and pines and making them shudder so that red needles dropped down in a continuous cascade into the agitated and shadowy flood.

　

　

At Cave Point, fifteen foot yellow cliffs rise from sea-pillars planted in the lake. Some kayaks are exploring the shallow grotto-like caves undercut in the limestone cliffs by the waves. It’s calm this afternoon and kids in soaked cut-off jeans and tee-shirts are jumping into a greenish pot of water cradled between the cliffs and the point. The kids leap out far enough to avoid the shallows on the terrace of rock jutting into the lake and splash into the center of the kettle incised in the cliffs. It doesn’t look dangerous but I know the water is very cold. As soon as the kids land in the kettle, they clamber up onto the rock shelf and, then, can climb easily to the higher wooded terrace above from which they can jump again. Everyone plunges in feet-first and no one dives.

This is a county park, although surrounded on all sides by a State Park (Whitefish Dunes). The crowd here is different from the people in the State Park, a fee area that you can’t enter without paying between eight or eleven dollars. Here a lot of people are smoking and the women are all tattooed and very heavy-set and there are phalanxes of Harley-Davidson’s parked by the pit toilets. People are picnicking and drinking beer and, on the point, a bunch of disheveled proletarian kids are waiting their turn to plunge into the water in the little bowl between the cliffs.



　

　

　

"Derringer," I asked, "like the little gun?" Derringer was drunk and hilarious. "Oh no," he said. "There is nothing little about this gun." We were sitting in the Monkey Bar on Commercial Street in Provincetown on Cape Cod. I had a couple of hours until my wife’s seminar back at Eastham would finish and so I was killing time with a screw-driver at the tavern. It was around 11:00 in the morning, but many of the men in the bar were already drunk. Derringer’s face was flushed, although I didn’t know if his red cheeks and brow were due to sunburn or alcohol. Periodically, I scratched at the mosquito bites on my jaw and underarms.

I told Derringer that I had gone to Race Point to hike. "It’s nice there," Derringer said. He offered to buy me another screw-driver but I thought it best to pay for my own drinks. The bar was lit for night although it was a bright sunny day outside. Some fairy-lights twinkled over cubicle-shaped booths, electric cords entwined with plastic vines and flowers to make bowers over those chairs and tables. Most of the customers were bellied up to the bar. Neon tubes twisted like colored balloons made a flourish overhead and the front panel of the bar itself, against which our stools were drawn, was a translucent panel of plastic lit from within by red flickering bulbs – this lighting effect made our laps and knees shimmer as if dipped in pale, heatless flame. Everyone seemed to know everyone else and people shouted across the room to their friends. In one corner, a Tv set showed a baseball game that seemed to loiter in mid-air like a curious, involuted dream.

Derringer told me that once he had gone into the woods by Race Point with a friend. He and his friend were swathed in mosquito netting. This was just before dawn in early September when the park was empty. His friend handcuffed him to a birch tree and, then, pulled down his pants, exposing his penis. "I looked down," Derringer said, "and I saw that it was black and furry with mosquitos. They were biting me everywhere." "Was that painful?" I asked. "Oh, yes," Derringer said, "but, also, delicious." Derringer paused and took a sip from the screw-driver he was drinking from fish-bowl sized goblet. The drinks were expensive – fifteen dollars for the orange juice (not freshly squeezed) and vodka. Derringer said that the mosquitos were voracious and they took lots of his blood and some of them were even the big tiger-striped insects with needle-like stings and abdomens marked with bright parallel lines. After a few minutes of this torture, Derringer’s friend, then, stooped and, with his fingers covered by rubber gloves, plucked a bouquet of poison ivy. "You aren’t going to use that on me," Derringer moaned. "Oh, yes I am," his friend told him.

"So what happened?" I asked. "I suffered the worst," Derringer said. He shrugged. "The whole organ swole up," he told me. "It didn’t do anything for length, I’ll tell you, but width? Jesus, you should of seen." He said that the entire shaft of his penis was oozing some sort of exudate. The irritation put him in a state of perpetual erection for close to a week. "Sounds awful," I said. "It was awful, but...you know..." Derringer’s eyes lost focus and took on a dreamy look.

"I ended up with not just West Nile, but also Lyme disease and Dengue fever," Derringer said. "Those were unintended consequences."

Derringer got out his wallet and offered to buy me another screwdriver. "Oh no," I said. "I have to get back to my wife’s convention."

"So be it," Derringer said.

　

　

Cherries were integral to the Door Shakespeare Company’s performance of Much Ado about Nothing. On stage, the actors swilled cherry cider and big cases of fresh cherries were stacked on the corner of the stage where I had earlier performed my poor version of Macbeth’s final soliloquy. The play was beautiful, funny, and profound. Julie and I sat in the second row of folding chairs on the risers. Beside me there was a blind man with a morose-looking, motionless service dog. The dog curled at the man’s feet and his companion, a middle-aged woman who used a walker to ambulate, read to him from the program. She read loudly in a voice that seemed to affirm the words of the text as monumental and important. A family consisting of an African-American man, his handsome wife, and beautiful 20 year-old daughter sat in the front row. When the woman finished her reading of the program, the fat African-American man said: "Thank you very much. Now, I don’t have to read it."

In the play, Benedict and Beatrice are in love but don’t know it – conducting a "kind of merry war" of wit with one another. Other characters in the play contrive that the two declare their love for one another. In Benedict’s case, this is accomplished by conspirators declaring that Beatrice is mad with love for Benedict, while the hapless lover eavesdrops. In Shakespeare plays, eavesdroppers may be present on stage with those to whom they are listening, but simply unacknowledged. In the Door Company Shakespeare production, Benedict hid around the margins of the stage, concealing himself behind crates of cherries or darting around to the back side of the maple tree or, even, disguising himself as an audience member. He stole into the first row of the audience, hiding his eyes behind a program that he picked up off a vacant seat. Then, he slipped into the audience itself, crouching in one of the higher rows overlooking the stage. At the midpoint in the dialogue on stage, Benedict rolled his program into a tube and, then, swatted one of the audience members on the top of the head. This was hilarious.

Of course, I was the member of the audience to take the blow, a surprising slap to the center of my bald spot, scalp-terrain decorated by mosquito bites like Indian burial mounds. Everyone laughed uproariously at my discomfiture. At the intermission, people approached me, one after another, and asked if I were okay. "None the worse for wear," I said. "How is your head?" the African-American woman asked. "He hit me pretty hard," I said. The woman showed her beautiful white teeth, rolled back her head, and laughed.

Later, it was dark in the woods. The risers seemed to exhale bug-repellant. I looked up into the air and saw that there was a grey and hideous canopy of mosquitos frustrated and hovering only a little above our heads. When we rose to depart after the play, our cheeks and eyes and foreheads dipped into the cloud of mosquitos and they bit us.

　

　

The cherries were an anachronism of course. 　Door County Shakespeare’s production of Much Ado about Nothing is set in situ – a great manor on the peninsula. The soldiers involved in the romantic intrigue are troops returning from the Civil War and gathered at the mansion for an 1865 Independence Day celebration. In one interlude, the troops perform a bluegrass number about preferring picking cherries to fighting in the war. It’s a beautiful song and fits well with play’s themes but isn’t historically correct.

The first communities settling in the harbors supported themselves by fishing. Then, came the timber companies who logged the peninsula until it was barren, the old sand dunes showing beneath the ruin of the forests that had been cut-down. Cherries were first grown on the peninsula about thirty years after the Civil War and the modern orchards weren’t really ubiquitous until the 1920's.

　

　

The overlook tower at Potawatomi State Park had been recently assessed by an engineer and found to be dangerous. Plywood sheets were fastened around the entrance to the tower, a frail-looking building that rose about forty feet over the bluff-top, steel steps leading up to steel platforms three or four of them stacked atop one another and the whole tinker-toy assembly surmounted by a metal-fenced viewing station. The plywood walls were supposed to block access to the steel steps inside, but it looked to me as if someone had pried some of the wood apart to make a small opening in the barrier.

I sat a picnic table about sixty feet from the overlook tower making some notes in my Moleskin. As I wrote, there was a loud thud, the sound of something crashing down and landing next to the tower. The noise alarmed me, but when I looked up I could not see what had fallen, it wasn’t clear to me what had dropped out of the sky. I stood and walked around the perimeter of the rusting metal tower, but could not determine what had fallen. A vague sort of panic hollowed me out for a moment, but, then, the feeling passed and I felt that I was all right.

No one was around. I went to my car and drove back down the curving road to the shoreline.

　

　

The restaurant was called Lure and it occupied an old church sanctuary atop the hill at Sister Bay. At Ephraim, a little down the coast, I had stopped to read a historical marker embedded in a stone pyramid that supported a big flag pole. The flag had been taken down but the hardware on the ropes on the pole snapped against the mast-like column in the strong wind coming off the bay. A couple miles out in the water I saw a great pillar of rain falling into the lake, grey-green vertical streaks densely gathered together between two outrigger-curls of bone-white storm cloud. The wind was strong and the bay choppy.

At the restaurant, the storm came a few minutes after we had been seated. Our waitress had left her car windows open and, when she returned to our table a few minutes after the downpour, her brow was running with water and her hair was soaked. She brought us martinis – her hands were wet and dripped on the napkins.

As I was leaving the restaurant, an older couple came up to me and asked how my head felt. They were referring to the blow delivered to my bald spot by Benedict the married man. "I’m fine," I said.

I felt like a celebrity.

　

　

On one trail I walked up a hill from a shoreside pull-out on a loop road in a state park. A marker at the pull-out said that this had once been the location of an exclusive summer camp for young ladies. The camp had been founded by a family in St. Louis and was expensive – it cost $350 to send your daughter to that place and most of the girls who had spent their summers here were debutantes from St. Louis. On the hillside, there had been a dining hall and some buildings where the girls could gather and, then, several rows of rustic cabins with picturesque names – "Delight Village" and "Gaslight Alley". The marker shows a beautiful young girl with the face of a pre-Raphaelite angel. The name of the encampment for society debutantes was Meenagha and it flourished between 1919 and 1948.

I walked on a trail up the hill. It was a pleasant stroll in a cathedral of trees. As soon as I felt that I had entered the wilderness, the trail skirted a clearing where there was an old, battered-looking, but still playable tennis court, seemingly the last remnant of Camp Meenagha. A dozen yards later, I encountered a trail marked with this enigmatic sign: Left - Skate // Right - Stride. There is no real wilderness in Door County – just when it seems that you have left the haunts of man, you will encounter a bike path on which two vigorous old people are vigorously pedaling through the woods. People are everywhere and the landscape is mostly domesticated except for the steep slopes and the cliffsides fissured with crevasses to which the ravens have returned.

I could hear the lake whispering even though it was not visible to me.

　

　

On another trail, I saw something red, slumped across a clearing. The red was very bright and I hurried forward to the object sprawled next to the path. It was a fallen tree, disemboweled by insects, and leaking a kind of red sawdust, like blood, onto the trail.

　

　

A lighthouse occupies Cana Island. The water is so high that it has flooded the jagged limestone causeway across which you must walk to reach the tiny islet. Access is now provided by a volunteer driving a John Deere garden tractor who hauls you across the knee-deep flood in a kind of hay-wagon. The trip is jarring, but better than trying to wade. The stones under the three-feet of surging water are sharp and slippery and they can cut your feet.

The little lighthouse is about sixty feet high and you have to climb a narrow, winding spiral stair fashioned of old wrought iron to reach the top. Its stifling in the tower and you are sweating when you emerge from the kiln-like brick column. The last few steps are difficult as well because you have to twist and stoop forward almost on all fours to climb out onto the platform. The reward is a view up and down the coast-line where there are innumerable inlets and small flotillas of wooded islets along the shore.

The lighthouse is set in a "unique cultural landscape" – at least, this is what the placards in the small museum in the lighthouse keeper’s dwelling advises. What this means is that the center of island has been completely cleared to form a large open and grassy lawn. The edges of the island are tonsured with trees like a monk’s pate. At each cardinal direction, a small walkway, paved and lined with a concrete wall leads through a little arch and onto the shelf of dolomite on which the island rests. The dolomite is pale and concentric to the island, mostly flooded on the day of our visit. The lighthouse is still active – it’s a guidance lighthouse, not a warning beacon with respect to submerged shoals or reefs and remains on official maps of Lake Michigan.

It was late in the afternoon when we visited and we rode the last motorized trip across the flooded causeway. Other tourists were wading the hundred yards to the island, tennis shoes tied around their necks, and they were moaning and crying-out because the sharp stones were cutting their feet. Far out on the lake, a motorboat bounced over the waves, thudding as it pounded at the water, rising and falling, a sound like an Indian tom-tom.

Nothing about the Cana Island lighthouse surpasses the beauty or interest of Split Rock Lighthouse on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota – in general, this is a problem with Door County if you are familiar with Minnesota’s North Shore. The landscape is far more dramatic in Minnesota and scenery – towering cliffs and huge waterfalls and deadly-looking surf crashing against house-sized boulders – much more spectacular or, perhaps, more accurately sublime, a mixture of beauty with terror.

　

　

When Julie looked at her picture taken at Sven’s Bluff, she discovered something strange. I stood at the right side of the image, fat and disheveled, and, then, beside me, a big black bird was gamboling in mid-air, pitching to the side and seeming to roll on an updraft. The bird had the ruffled fringe of shaggy neck feathers and the spade-shaped tail of a raven.

　

　

Red wild raspberries were growing along the side of the parking lot at a Northport State Park. I plucked a few raspberries and tasted them – they were very tart. I was raised in Eden Prairie, a suburb next to Hopkins where there is an annual raspberry festival. My father grew raspberries and so I am familiar with them.

After I had tasted the raspberries, a woman came from a car with an Illinois license plate. She pointed to the raspberries. "Beware," she said to me. "This is poison ivy."