Author: fegbaria

Snapshots: Door County

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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.

Peninsula State Park
Schoolhouse Beach
Washington Island lavender farm
Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant and Butik (Sister Bay)
Sister Bay
Alpaca!
The Ridges Sanctuary
Wilson’s Restaurant and Ice Cream Parlor

New York, New York

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A trip to the other city — you know, the one that’s not the Second City.

Constantly buzzing, moving, honkingly mad.

That’s New York, for better or worse.

Whether it’s Chinatown, the Bronx on gameday, Midtown, Morningside Heights, the East Village, Astoria, or anywhere else in the bustling boroughs, all of it is a stark reminder that everything is relative.

In Chicago, the Loop seems a loud, imposing place at times. Train cars screech and rumble on elevated tracks, horns honk from time to time and sellers of Streetwise offer up their printed materials, each with her or her own method — Streeeeeetwisseeeee. Streetwise Streetwise. StreetwiseStreetwiseStreetwise. The river cuts through it all, a watery observer.

But in New York, the spectacle rises to another level. The sound of honking horns is ambient noise, like the type used by the sleep-deprived seeking help: trickling waterfalls, rainforest sounds, Fifth Avenue cacophony. I sometimes wonder if the residents of what can be deemed New York’s quieter corners have trouble falling asleep.

I was reminded recently that Brooklyn alone nearly matches the City of Chicago in population. This is not to say that one city is “better” or “worse” simply for the fact of population, the number of breathing and living human beings in a place — rather, it’s a matter of scale, as all things are.

From the touristy trips this past week to see Lady Liberty, the “Seinfeld diner” and a trek up north to see the Yankees — only to miss Brett Gardner’s first-inning home run, the Bronx Bombers’ only run on a chilly evening against the visiting Mariners — to morning walks around Chinatown, a walk through a street market and an Upright Citizens Brigade show, one thing kept coming to mind: the notion of seeming infinity.

The thing I like about Chicago is its patchwork feel. In New York, there are neighborhoods, broadly. In Chicago, neighborhoods are like city-states, almost self-contained municipalities.

Again, one is not “better” than the other. Some things just are. The distinction is best served on a platter of scale, a calibrating dish of perspective, served cool when need be, hot when required.

After seeing Lady Liberty, the next stop was Ellis Island, where visitors could explore the places immigrants bustled through, poked and prodded by doctors, asked about their past lives and given new names. Most made it through, before quotas in the first quarter of the 20th century tightened the flow of those seeking something: opportunity, asylum, a fresh start, a reuniting.

A walk through the museum is but a tiny peek into those many thousands and thousands of peoples’ experiences, people coming from more countries than there are Chicago neighborhoods. But through it all, I was reminded of infinity, of the seemingly limitless potential of a place — and while cliches about the city, New York, have been etched into popular parlance, there is truth to them.

It’s a land of big buildings and big voices and big ideas. It is trash bags piled on the streets and money piled higher than those very trash bags. It is crudity mixed with remarkable kindness. Swindlers and Samaritans, singers and screamers, food carts and high-priced fare, Broadway shows and Yankee Stadium’s 400 level.

New York is, in summary, a miraculous place.

So, too, is Chicago. It’s just different, ya know.

Above all, visiting New York provided a reminder of all the things that make home home. Subway rides in New York were jarring, not because of the seemingly endless parades of roving troubadours, but the fact that stops weren’t announced with that Red Line voice proclaiming that the doors would be opening on the right or the left. You miss those sorts of things when you leave — at least I do.

There’s also the idea of escaping from infinity, an idea that is possible in Chicago, where one can slip away to the neighborhoods, away from the epicenter, far away from the nexus of State and Madison. In New York, it’s all around you, everywhere, all the time.

New York is a city where dreams are crushed and fulfilled, amid a din of a thousand languages and taxis perilously weaving. It’s a place where you can get a slice of pizza at a new place every day and seemingly never run out of places to try for the rest of your existence (an existence that would surely be shortened by such a pizza-heavy diet).

Chicago is a place with beginnings and endings. One neighborhood turns into another. The bustle slowly decrescendos away from the center, leaving some neighborhoods soaked in a sort of pseudo-suburbia, of quietude with a dash of city grit: concrete, cars parked nearly on top of one another, the faint whoosh of the nearest El train exhaling from underground a couple of blocks away.

New York is not home, and it’s possible that it never will be.

But for now, I can visit and look on in wonder.

And after the visit is over, I can come home, where I’m happy to be back.