June | 2016 | 77 and beyond

I finally had the chance to make it up to Door County recently, a place I’d been wanting to go for some time.

I’d read so much about it, including buying a copy of Door County Magazine last summer from the Main newsstand in Evanston. My expectations soared and it looked like a place that couldn’t quite be real.

It just about lived up to all of the hype and more. One can wave away the notion of quietude as a cliche, but there really is something beneficial in leaving a place paralyzed by cars and noise and sometimes not-so-nice people — metro Chicago — to towns in which boats in the harbor might come close to outnumbering the nearest town’s population (looking at you, Ephraim).

Some places are quiet — for example, Chicago neighborhoods eventually go to sleep and some even have a serenity to them in the late hours of the night. But even those quietest of the quiet spots in the city have an ever-present white noise.

A few other places, however, are seemingly absent of sound. The Solitude Swale in the Ridges Sanctuary was one of the quietest places I’ve ever been in my life. So quiet, mind-numbingly quiet, hear-your-soul quiet. Whisper outside quiet. There’s an intensity to that sort of quiet, that sort of absence of noise beyond that which is natural.

As John Muir wrote: “In every walk with Nature, one receives far more than he seeks.”

That’s what Door County was — a panoply of natural beauty and small-town charm. It’s a place that makes you want to invoke concepts that might be considered hokey, but Door County doesn’t have time for the tiresome irony of today. It’s a place of friendly folks, a place where one scoop of ice cream is the equivalent of three scoops elsewhere, a place where the caramel popcorn can come with a tinge of lavender.

I know I’ll be back — for the cherry ice cream from Wilson’s, the Schoolhouse Beach on Washington Island, to look up and see Al Johnson’s goats on the roof, and so much more.