Choosing Door County

At some point or another, almost all of us in Door County had to make a conscious decision to call this place home.

There’s the retiree who spent their career in a bigger city but left that all behind to enjoy their retirement years in Door County. And there’s the person of great wealth who has means to live anywhere in the world, yet they choose to come back to Door County every season.

It’s easy to recognize that choice when talking about someone who relocated to Door County. But it’s just as true for those who grew up here.

If you were a local kid who went away to college but now lives in Door County, obviously at some point you also chose to come home. And those who never left had to forego the enticements of more job opportunities and a lower cost of living just a few hours away in the bigger cities down the road. I know of many remarkably skilled and talented Door County folks who probably could command a greater salary in the Fox Cities, Milwaukee or Chicago, but they decided to stay here.

And even those at the bottom of the economic ladder have made a conscious choice to be in Door County. Many have traded the stability of a year-round job in a larger city for seasonal or part-time work here because they also want to call Door County home.

So even if you were born here, at some point or another, you probably made the deliberate decision to stay in Door County. Our community is not a place you find yourself in by accident. You have to choose to be in Door County.

Inherent in that choice is probably our community’s greatest strength. We all want to be here. We decided that Door County was going to be our home.

That means the people of Door County, at our very core, are optimists. We came here (or chose never to leave) because we believe this place offers us a quality of life and a sense of community that doesn’t exist to the same degree in the big cities of the world.

Walk into Main Street Market and count how many conversations are going on among friends as they stand between the shelves. Grab a cup of coffee at the Blue Horse Bistro and see how many people you know that stop on by.

This isn’t a place where you can be anonymous and hide from the world. Door County is where you come to be a part of a community.

A few years ago my wife and I returned to Wisconsin after spending years living in bigger cities. In most places, the wealthiest families tend to live in one neighborhood, the low-income folks in another, and the rest of us somewhere in between. That meant our schools were divided largely along income lines. There were the “rich” schools and the “poor” schools – and they didn’t mix.

In Door County our school districts have relatively few kids but serve sizeable geographic areas. So here my kids share the same classroom with the children who live in the most expensive houses on the bay, and those who come from the most modest apartments around.

It doesn’t matter so much how much money we have, where we came from, or whether we lived our whole life in this place. We all love Door County, and we all choose to be here. That decision is what unites us and makes us all neighbors.

So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when you realize just how many charitable and civic groups serve Door County. Statistically speaking, based on national averages and our population, our county should have 93 community organizations. The reality is that over 350 non-profit groups are based in Door County.

If you love something, you want to preserve the best of it and help it overcome its challenges. We love this place, so it’s no wonder that we give of our time and resources to sustain the community we love.

Not too long ago I was talking with a former colleague from a big city who wondered why anyone would want to live in Door County. He reminded me of all the professional opportunities that I had to forego and the challenges of living literally at the end of the road.

But he’s got it all wrong. Door County isn’t at the road’s end. To those of us who choose to be here, Door County is the place at the end of the rainbow.