Boomerang Effect

When you grow up in Door County, especially Northern Door, you’re constantly reminded what a special place this is. As a kid, you don’t buy it, but it’s pounded into your head ad nausea by the newspaper, magazines, teachers, and – most vigorously – by the tourists you serve at your parents’ hotel, restaurant, or gift shop.

“You folks are so lucky to live here!” is a phrase the average Northern Door child hears a couple thousand times before they reach adulthood. But when you’re 12 you don’t know what they’re talking about.

Lucky? It’s 45 minutes to get to a movie. Three hours to a Brewers game. And it takes a couple hours worth of phone calls and transportation arranging to get a 3-on-3 game of pickup basketball going. Wanna’ play baseball? Great, just be prepared to use ghost runners and make sure you’ve got an outfielder with enough range to cover foul line to foul line.

But as you age your appreciation for the charms of the peninsula grows in leaps and bounds, especially after you’ve spent some time in college holed up in high-rise dorm rooms.

Now 28, I figured I had full appreciation for our peninsula, but then I took a day-trip to my girlfriend’s hometown a couple weeks ago. We’ve spent many conversations comparing childhoods, and though she has deep family ties to Door County, ours in many ways couldn’t have been more different.

I went to Gibraltar, for so long the Packerland Conference’s smallest school and Webster’s poster child for team sports futility. She went to Lincoln High School in Wisconsin Rapids, one of the state’s largest high schools and one in which second place was about the worst finish anyone could tolerate.

Gibraltar often fails to field freshman and junior varsity teams in many sports. She showed me her yearbook. It featured a couple pages devoted to their power lifting team. Power lifting…as a sport. With fans. They have tennis and ice hockey too, not to mention a bevy of other extra-curriculars.

Their wrestling team has won three times as many state championships in the last 13 years (12) than my Gibraltar High school football team had total victories in four years (4). Needless to say, our experiences in high school athletics weren’t exactly similar.

As we drove around Rapids, a city of 17,000 dominated by the mammoth presence of the Stora Enso paper mill on the west side of the Wisconsin River, I asked what kind of summer job she worked in high school.

“I didn’t have one,” she said. I squeezed my brow quizzically. “I played softball all summer,” she continued, answering the question she knew I’d pose next.

It was another image that doesn’t exactly fit in Door County, that of kids spending their summers playing. As a coach at Gibraltar, I’m painfully aware of how many students feel they must schedule athletics around work, and not vice versa. And when help is in such short supply that you can get canned by one boss, only to get a better wage from another a couple hours later, it’s hard to convince them otherwise.

Here, we are so indoctrinated with the idea that working full-time is just something you do once you hit 14 that it’s hard to imagine not planning your summers around it.

But our comparisons weren’t all one-sided. As we drove down 8th Avenue, the city’s busiest stretch lined with chain restaurants, grocery and department stores, I found myself struggling to imagine spending my summers there. Aside from the general malaise I’m prone to anytime I can’t get to a view of the lake within 10 minutes, there’s that lack of “special” one subconsciously feels about Door County.

That feeling is in part due to the fact that people everywhere else are yearning for their next opportunity to come here. Come summer, the world comes to us – vacationers from across the Midwest, summer workers stream in from as much as half a world away, and old friends return for weekends or months. Throughout the winter, it gives you something to look forward to (and sometimes dread), and come August we start looking forward to November again.

In Rapids, and other such towns and cities, residents look ahead to the chance to get away in the summer, as my girlfriend’s family did, to Door County for weekends or more.

This sense of place, and that place being “special,” is what makes Door County so difficult to break free from for young adults. Our restaurants, bars, and stores are littered with smart, intriguing workers who carry in their back pocket a college degree granting them access to much more glorious careers. But they come back here.

I asked my girlfriend what tavern we should go to where we’d catch up with her old friends and get a taste of the town. A place like Husby’s, Bayside, or the Bowl. She sighed, conjuring up something.

“This isn’t like Door County,” she began. “People don’t come back here. Anybody worth seeing gets out and they don’t come back for the summer like in Door County. Why would they?”

I hadn’t really thought about that. Growing up in Door County, I just fell into the assumption that that’s how it was almost everywhere. But as I looked around again, I saw her point. Had I grown up in Wisconsin Rapids, I might have plowed through school and earned my degree in four…check that, maybe three years.

That need to get out is powerful here as well, as the geographic isolation can often be stifling. But once you get a little distance from the peninsula, and a little perspective, you come back one day and realize how much you’ve missed it. How special the views, the feel, the pace, and the people really are.

Door County’s boomerang effect is strong. There’s still tremendous pressure to cut yourself loose, but even as you flip burgers in a hot kitchen in July agonizing about whether you should be putting that degree to use (or taking those last few credits to get it), you take a glance down the street at the water and think, “I’m pretty lucky to live here figuring this all out, all things considered.”