“Baker”

I’ve been here, on the island, forever. My grandparents. Their grandparents. Sometime back then, somebody came from Iceland. That woulda been the 1870s, I guess. Somethin’ like that. Somebody else, a Yankee, from Gloucester. That’s true for most of us here, some variation of it, and one way or another, most are related. Some say inbred, but then some can always find a way to put you down.

Illustration by Ralph Murre

Up here, you pretty much learn to take care of yourself or you get off the island. You shingle a barn, build a boat, play a fiddle, read a lot, drink some, fish some. If not, you head off. College. An unpaid-for plastic house in an unpaid-for plastic suburb. A big TV. A big car. Big money and bigger bills. Golf. They come back for a weekend now and then. Maybe the Fourth. Can’t get away much, they say.

That’s not for me – all I ever wanted was to run a ferry. Black and white, over and back. Probably sounds boring to you, doesn’t it? Just over and back, time and again, ‘til the end. But there’s that light on the water. There are birds and boats and fog and wind. There’s ice. There are stories. More than that, though. There are the people. You’d always get to bring the new ones for the first time – take them across, into your world. Think of that. And bringing people back, who’d been away too long. Of course, sometimes, you’d just bring the bodies of the ones who thought they’d never come back. That cemetery up at Schoolhouse Beach has some people like that. The other graveyards, too. Some are buried over here that nobody ever knew.

As you can see, it didn’t turn out that I became a ferry-boat captain, and it makes me wonder if anybody’s life ever goes as planned. Oh, I worked at it for quite a while – worked as a deckhand in the busy seasons, did some cottage repairs for summer people in the winter. Cut firewood. And read and studied everything I could get my hands on to be the best gol-darned boat captain on the lakes. But you take a physical before going to write your test, and I didn’t count on my eyes not being good enough to get in the door of the Coast Guard exam station down at Toledo. You have to go clear to Toledo, Ohio. That would have been my first trip past Green Bay, and I was excited to go, too, even though people have told me I didn’t miss a lot at Toledo.

Since my glasses corrected me to something like 20/20, I never thought about my eyes in all the time I’d been preparing, racking up hours, hitting the books. The Coast Guard makes up the rules, though, and they had a minimum standard for your eyes in their un-corrected state, I mean without your glasses. I didn’t pass. It was that simple. Or should have been. But I doubt if it’s ever simple when somebody wakes you up in the middle of a dream.

I guess you’d say I didn’t handle it well. Finished out that season on deck, but got to drinking a little. More than a little, I suppose. A lot. Decided I’d never get on the ferry again. I’d been going with Astrid Gunnlaugsson for a long time, and we planned to marry, but she left me, then the island. I heard she married some guy out in Seattle and they have kids. Pretty. She was really pretty.

One winter, my parents got tired of the cold up around here and drove down to Florida. Just to look around, you know? They were on this long highway out to the Keys there, when some kind of freak wind blew their little green van right off the road and landed them upside down in a couple feet of water. They’re buried up there at Schoolhouse Beach, too.

Well, you found your way here, so I guess you can see this little house my Grampa Nels built is right about in the dead center of the island. Can’t see the water at all. I like that fine. People wonder how in the hell you can live on an island and not see the water for more than 14 years. That’s why they sent you here, isn’t it? To write my story, like I couldn’t write it myself, if there was any damned story to tell. There’s not.

I get up early, I bake bread for about half the people on the island, I have a glass of rye whiskey after supper, and I go to bed. Who the hell needs to see the water that just takes everything away?

Ralph Murre

Photo by Len Villano

Many Door County residents know Ralph Murre as a friendly, soft-spoken poet who stands before audiences each month at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship reading freshly penned poetry; a writer who presents flawed characters with sparse, yet rich detail; an artist whose distinctive ink drawings complement many of his stories and poems, and those of others; and an editor who created his own press, Little Eagle Press, which has published a number of anthologies and chapbooks by local authors.

The Wisconsin native who worked as an architect and mariner enjoys the rural life – hiking through Door County’s parks, along its shoreline – but also embraces and supports the county’s thriving arts community.

“My stuff is kind of dark,” Murre warned me when I approached him to write a piece for Door County Living. “Perfect,” I replied.

~ Sally Slattery