STURGEON BAY: DECEMBER 4, 2012
Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail is a roughly 1,000-mile trail that roughly follows the terminal moraine from the last Ice Age.1 Starting at a wooden sign just off a small parking lot on a big hill in a remote, woodsy region of Potawatomi State Park, the 32 year-old trail curves hundreds of miles south, hundreds of miles back north, then turns west and ends in St. Croix Falls, on the Wisconsin/Minnesota border.
Potawatomi State Park is on the Door Peninsula, a very large finger of land in the northeastern region of America’s Dairyland.2 The peninsula leans out into Lake Michigan, separating the majority of Green Bay from the Great Lake’s northernmost reaches. About halfway up the peninsula, an arm of Green Bay extends about ten miles southeastward into the Door Peninsula—an arm called Sturgeon Bay. Potawatomi State Park takes up 1,225 acres of coastline on the northwestern shores of Sturgeon Bay, just northwest of two suspension bridges that lead you over the water to the aptly-named city of Sturgeon Bay, where I sit right now, sipping a hot cup of coffee and thinking about ice.
I left Alise and Willie six days ago and made the 240-mile drive up here from Chicago. My “plan”—if you could call it that—was to check in to a cheap motel and take a week to just be alone—to work on the book, clear my head, and reconnect. The week would also give Alise some much needed space to prepare for her move to Los Angeles in a couple of weeks. It was hard to leave Willie when we had just welcomed him into our home—hard because you can’t talk to a dog on the phone, you can’t tell a dog how much you miss him. I knew that I would be dying to see him and hold him and knock him around after only a few hours away, which I was. But I stuck with my plan, regardless. I checked into a motel up here called the Holiday Music Motel.3 After meeting my hosts for the week—a tall, thin, and just-nice-enough couple decked out in black denim and leather and smelling of cigarettes—I unpacked my bags and set up my computer, pens and notebooks on the desk in my room, and then I headed out to check out the town and Potawatomi State Park.
I don’t know what Sturgeon Bay is like in the summer when the harbors are loaded with ships and some 200,000 tourists are swarming the shops on Main Street, but in the winter, it is an eerily quiet and unassuming town—grey and laden with last week’s snow, its trees bare and its residents sparse and sullen. I wandered around the twelve or so blocks that make up the downtown area on the northwest side of the bay, peeking into shop windows and browsing a surprisingly well-stocked rare and used bookstore for an hour or so, then I crossed the Michigan Street bridge and walked through the patch of grass that is known as Bayview Park before stopping into a two-story grey cement brick place called the Greystone Castle for a beer and some food.
Inside the “castle,” one is greeted by a low-hanging drop ceiling, carpeted floors, and walls packed with the trophies of local hunters and fisherman—deer heads and waxy fish and various other taxidermy—along with neon beer signs, dart boards, and a grotesque juke box—one of those newish-but-not-new-enough CD deals that are breaking all the time. The bar was covered in beer bottles and napkins, and several locals were hunched over plastic baskets of food, chatting with one another and looking up at a college sporting event of some kind on the television. I waved to the red-faced and blonde-haired bartender and elbowed up to the bar.
About halfway through a prime rib sandwich that looked disgusting but tasted pretty damned good, I was working on my second bottle of Budweiser when an older gentlemen in a camouflage cap who had three distinctly different variants of plaid on his torso lifted his bottle of beer from the bar and nodded at me.
“YOU WORK ON THE BOATS?” he yelled. There was no reason for him to yell. He was just one of those old yelling types.
“No sir. Just visiting.”
“WHERE FROM?”
“Chicago.”
“CHICAGO?! Shit.”
I laughed. “I was born in Illinois, but my Mom’s whole family is from up here. I love Wisconsin. Been coming here my whole life.”
“TO STURGEON BAY?”
“No, no. Just up to Wisconsin. Got family in Kenosha, Milwaukee, Sheboygan, Wausau. Though I haven’t been to Wausau in ages.” I thought of Jack Duffy for the first time in a while. Then took a sip of my beer.
“We don’t get many visitors up here to Sturgeon Bay,” the old man offered. “At least not in the off season. Too cold. Nothing to do. People are fuckin’ pussies.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, opened it, looked inside, then closed it and returned it to his pocket. “What brought you here? You looking to move?” He chuckled, then coughed up some phlegm.
“I’m just getting away for a while. Too many distractions in the city.”
“Sure, sure.” He started to grab his pack of cigarettes again, then took a big swill of his beer. “You’re lookin’ for some good tail, ain’t you?”
I laughed again. “No sir.”
He finally stopped yelling for a goddamned minute and leaned in close. Those old guys that yell all the time, when they aren’t screaming their heads off they’re leaning in close. “Yeah, well, I’ll just tell you that all the pretty older ladies who are up here on business stay at the Stone Harbor and hang out in the hotel bar in the evenings, looking for boys just like you to take up to their room and tear to shreds.” He winked.
“I’m really not here for that,” I said. “I’m actually thinking about getting out and doing a nice hike up around Potawatomi. Other than that, I’m going to be hanging out in my room at the Holiday working on my book.”
“BOOK?!” The old guy threw back the rest of his beer, then put a few dollars down on the bar, stood, and put on his jacket. “You artistic types are all the same,” he said. He extended a thick hand. “Have fun with the ladies at Stone Harbor tonight.”
I finished my sandwich and second beer and watched the football game for a bit—actually I watched the people in the bar watch the game—then I put on my jacket and hat and walked toward the restroom, where I was greeted by yet another old man in plaid, this one in big, wire-framed, tinted glasses with a grey beard and a black trucker cap. He was zipping up his fly as he approached, spitting hot, breathy words in my face.
“I heard ya tell old Georgey der dat y’re lookin’ for a hike, eh?” he asked. His accent was ridiculous, like he had just stepped out of Fargo. “Go out der to da Ice Age Trail. Don’t’cha‘know it starts up here, right? Right der on Sturgeon Bay. Big ol’ trail. Goes west to Minnesoh-da, ‘fficially, but me, der, I think dat ol’ glacier dat da trail follows used ta spread all da way out to da Pacific.” I nodded at the guy and thanked him, then tried to scoot by him. But he moved so he was right in front of me, almost bumping me with his chest, actually. I avoided his eyes and looked at a schedule of upcoming Green Bay Packers games on the fake wood paneled wall next to us as he kept talking. “Pa himself told me actually dat der’s an old legend dat some of the first Injuns up here came upon dat big ol’ mountain of ice, and dat dey had written in some caves down der in da southwest part of da state—Eagle Cave, maybe, or maybe it was d’ose Kickapoo Caverns—you can go visit both of d’ose ta-day, and y’should—some t’ousand miles of underground tunnels ‘n shit like dat, and you take a tour with some pretty lady wit’ a flashlight ‘n a goofy hat.” I snuck a peek at him, and his big face was right there, inches from mine, his eyes wide behind his tinted glasses, his whiskey breath surrounding me. Then I looked back at the Packers’ schedule on the wall. The forest green background, the gold block letters, the Vikings coming to Lambeau on Sunday. “Anyways,” the guy continued, poking me in the chest to get my attention, “dese Injuns were lookin’ for da rest of der tribe, and dey started following the edge of dis mountain of ice dat just came down and stopped, just like dat, right der in the grass with a pile of rocks ‘n shit—and dey followed dat mountain on der horses or whatever, and it took ‘em all da way through da plains and da mountains and out to da ocean up der in Washington, don’t’cha’know, and der whole family was out der WAITIN’ FOR ‘EM when dey got der. Same tribe ‘n everyt’ing! And dey said dat ol’ glacier had sat right der for more’n’a HUNDR’D T’OUSAND YEARS just waitin’ for dem to come along so it could take’m out der, back to der family ‘fore it went ‘n melted away f’rever.”
I took a leak and paid my tab at the bar, then practically ran back across the Michigan Street Bridge to my room at the Holiday to write down that story before I forgot a word of it. Then I put a few extra layers on under my jacket and hopped in my car to drive out to the Ice Age Trail.
Though I don’t believe a word of the legend from a historical or scientific standpoint,4 the story’s significance in regards to my recurring dream about the bus trip to the Pacific Northwest and reunion with Don was not lost on me. I stood at the trailhead of the Ice Age Trail that day and looked through the sea of white bark trees and down across the grey valley and out over the icy water that spread east and north from the peninsula, and I thought that if I just started walking I could very literally and physically carry my mortal body all the way back to the Olympic Peninsula and to that cabin in my dreams, and I could become my father—not the version of my father who was back in Morrison, moving his hardware store into the old lumber building and trying to organize years of junk into some sort of manageable existence for himself, but my father who sat on that porch of that cabin with me, post-coital in the ethereal rainforest, a strange woman in his bed—that father who told me my old friends and acquaintances were all dead, then watched me smoke a cigarette and plunk “London Bridge is Falling Down” on a damp piano, and we had our moment before I woke up.
I could be that father and I could find that woman, and maybe someday a son from a past life could come find me just as I had done so many years before. And that could have all started right then. I could walk down the shores of Lake Michigan, through Two Rivers and Manitowoc, then turning inland and crossing the rolling upland of the Kettle Moraine—Sheboygan, Washington, Waukesha, Jefferson, and Walworth—winding along kettle ponds, eskers, kames, through marshes, towns and villages, avoiding the exhaust choked interstates of that hard-working mecca of big-hearted and wide-assed American Milwaukee to tramp through oak and hickory forests to the west—then northward, the quartzite of the Baraboo Hills, Mirror Lake, Devil’s Lake State Park, glacial Lake Wisconsin, sandstone buttes rising amongst black oak and jack pine, the Mecan River—past Wausau and happy old Jack Duffy, loving his grandchildren and writing his funny greeting cards that no one will ever see—and on into the north, with spruce, fir, maple, and birch, into the land of bogs, then beyond it into the wilderness of Chequamegon, crests of eskers, and further into what was once a great forest but was chopped down in order to build the cities of the Midwest back in the 19th century—then on into the Blue Hills under the ash, birch, and maple, and I’d be skipping up to the Minnesota border in snowy St. Croix in a month’s time, if that. And from there, I could cut my way through the forests on up to the North Country National Scenic Trail, and out over the massive expanse of white flat-then-explosively-dynamic Montana, and up to the Pacific Northwest Trail that runs the border of Canada up over the Idaho panhandle and eastern Washington State, and I’d find my cabin in the Hoh rainforest and be settling in with a good cup of tea next to a piping hot wood burning stove not four months from that very day that I decided to walk down that hill from that wooden sign just off a small parking lot on a big hill in a remote, woodsy region of Potawatomi State Park.
The thing was, though, that it was cold that day. It was really cold. And I missed my dog very much—far too much to go chasing after some glacier that would take me back to those woods in my dream. So what I did after wandering around the trailhead for an hour or so was get back in my car and turn the heat up to 72, and I put the fan on high and even turned on the little electric warmer that heats up my bum in the driver’s seat, and I sat there and listened to local talk radio and I smoked a cigarette and stared into the woods for a while, then I got out my phone and looked at pictures of Willie and I decided that I was alright for the time being—that my life was good and decent and I was a lucky man to be born in America and not the war-torn sands of Pakistan or the slums of Rio de Janeiro or the radioactive snow of Chernobyl or the labor camps of North Korea, and I drove back to Sturgeon Bay and bought myself some beers. I drank all those and went back to the same gas station for a half pint of bourbon, and then I drank that and walked around the town and proceeded to get absolutely shit-faced in all the little local bars—clinking bottles and getting clapped on the back by guffawing locals. And I did end up at the bar at the Stone Harbor Hotel late that night, but not to sleep with an older business woman, just to see if ol’ Georgey was right, and there was actually one there.
There wasn’t.
I spent the next four days drifting between brutal hangovers spent hammering away on my laptop in my room at the Holiday, and various states of intoxication on the frozen and salt-stained streets of Sturgeon Bay. Then, early this very morning under a pre-dawn northern sky, I smoked a little weed given to me by a crazy-eyed, coked up local kid at the one bar in Sturgeon Bay that had a dance floor and a disco ball, and I went for a drive up the coast to Newport State Park, located on the eastern side of the northernmost tip of the Door Peninsula, right by the “Door to the Way to Death.”
Looking out over the water this morning, the sun rising behind a thin and wispy layer of grey, I thought of the old man in the castle and the glacier. I could see the glacier—the mountain of ice, descending from the sky and coming down to meet the frozen earth—the mountain un-ascendable, its snout pushing straight down into the ground under a pile of rocks and debris, but its eyes pointing west, its whole body, in fact, gesturing to the west, telling the bronze-skinned and hide-clad men who rode up to meet it on horseback to “Go! Go! Trust in me. Follow my lead. I’ll take you home.” The glacier rolling west, rolling over the mountains to the rainforest and the coast, running away for thousands of years, connecting Wisconsin to Washington and the Olympic Peninsula, reuniting a family, then becoming withdrawn, retreating, and eventually disappearing into the mountains of Northern Canada forever. I remembered fat little bowl-haired Micah who once said to a classroom full of his fellow fifth graders back in Morrison, Illinois, that mountains were alive, and I remembered that the whole class laughed at him and he blushed and then the teacher didn’t make matters any better when she asked Micah if rocks were alive, and damn it all, Micah hadn’t learned his lesson with the first embarrassment and insisted that rocks were alive as well, and he even said, “Well, mountains grow, don’t they?” and everyone laughed at that, as well, and I remembered thinking that what Micah said actually had some sense to it, and I really should have spoken up and defended him.
So I sat there in those frozen woods on that massive lake and watched the sun come up over the northernmost reaches of the United States of America and I smoked a little more weed and yelled, “THE MOUNTAINS ARE ALIVE!” and there was no one there to hear me, but my breath came out in giant puffs of white fog and enveloped my head, and I rubbed my hands together and clapped them and thought that for the very first time in my life I was realizing that I could just see nature for what it was, and not as a reflection of some deeper thing within myself.
The ice had been ice, and now the water was water. The earth was always earth, the sky was always sky, and I and all my fellow human beings—all of us so pitiful in the ignorance of our interconnectedness—we were something else entirely. Then a cold breeze came down over the lake from those mountains in Canada I had been thinking about—those mountains where the North American Laurentide ice sheet was hiding away forever—and the breeze shook the trees in the diffuse light of the early morning, and I saw the breeze as a breeze, the trees as the trees, the un-seeable mountains of the north were nothing to me.
A terminal moraine is the accumulation of loose glacial debris like soil and rock that forms at the snout of a current-or-formerly-glaciated region, marking either the site of the ice edge for a long period, or the site of the glacier’s maximum advance. In the case of a terminal moraine marking the site of maximum advance, this is the end of the line—it’s as far as the glacier made it before it stopped moving forward and started to retreat within itself. ↩︎
Both Door Peninsula and Door County are named after the dangerous 7-mile-wide strait between the peninsula and the tiny Washington Island to the north—an island with a population of less than 700 which is nevertheless one of the largest and oldest Icelandic communities in the United States. Way back when the area was populated by Potawatomi and Ojibwa Indians and was first being inhabited by white mariners, fishermen, and farmers, the strait was given the French appellation Porte des Morts Passage by early French explorers, which in English means the “Door to the Way to Death”—quite a morbid title for an area of the country that now receives over 200,000 tourists during the sunny summer months, and has become known by more modern “we take summer vacation” types as “the Cape Cod of the Midwest.” ↩︎
The Holiday Music Motel was the first motel in Door County. It was built in 1952 in the modern motor court style, with the guests rooms facing out onto the parking lot, and it had the iconic metal neon sign out on the lot—the kind of neon sign that came about in the ‘50s and became prominent all over the United States in the ‘60s. For a motel, the place was and still is pretty styling: it’s got glass-block windows, track-lit hallways and stairs, and a white stucco and cement block construction, and the interior is equipped with fire-proof and chip-proof Simmons furnishings—iconic “retro” furniture. A year after opening, business was so good that a diner with a full breakfast menu opened up in the motel to serve the guests. Some fifty years went by with some changes in ownership but very little changes to the motel itself, and then, in 2006, a group of musicians and sound engineers who had banded together to create a music festival to save the historic Michigan Street steel bridge pooled their money and bought the motel. Since that group took control of the site, there have been several renovations to the motel—most of which were necessary due to an electrical fire in 2007—but the motel has retained all of its mid-twentieth century charm, and it has now gone green. It also hosts regular live music events, and is even home to a recording studio. I knew none of this when I reserved a room at the motel, however; my impetus for staying there was the free coffee, the clean, retrofitted rooms, and the $43-a-night price tag. ↩︎
From approximately 110,000 to 10,000 years ago, there was, in fact, a massive mountain (or sea) of ice known as the North American Laurentide ice sheet that covered most of Canada, New England, the northern Midwest, and parts of Idaho, Montana, and Washington. The most recent major advance of the ice sheet occurred only 21,000 years ago, and is referred to as the Late Wisconsin Glaciation. No matter how hard I looked, however, I couldn’t find any native tribes that had any legends about the North American Laurentide ice sheet, or that existed in both northeastern Wisconsin and northwestern Washington at the same time. ↩︎
