OK. What am I doing here, exactly?

It started with a hotel. 

I first came to Washington Island in 2004, in the thick of winter, to write a travel story about a new hotel and restaurant started by a friend of a friend. It was snowing, I’d never been to Door County before, and as the ferry only runs twice a day in the off-season, my navigator and I spent the night at Sturgeon Bay’s finest Super 8—after flagging down some guys with four-wheel drive to pull my struggling Dodge Neon out of a ditch east of Green Bay, where it had skidded in the quickening storm. It was an inauspicious start.

The next day we plugged on toward the Northport ferry dock—a journey that on a good day runs about 45 minutes and on a vaguely plowed stretch of 57 in February took something north of two hours. Somehow,we made the 9:30 boat. But as the Arni J. Richter (warning! song!) chopped through the ice choking Death’s Door I remember wondering what I had gotten myself into, and just how far away from home I had wandered.

Washington Island in February is, frankly, pretty dull. The year-round population is about 650 and only a few businesses (the grocery, the video store, the bars) are open. But it is also staggeringly beautiful. The entire island was silenced by a heavy new blanket of snow. Menacing icicles defended the trees and drifts of pure white powder cuddled up to the shuttered windows of shorefront summer homes.

We only stayed the weekend: long enough to take a class on Sicilian wine, do a shot of bitters, and meet a few of the locals who had put their muscle into the rebirth of the Washington Hotel. One of them, Lynn Utesch, who had a small cattle farm on the north side of the island and did double duty as the island’s Verizon guy, took hours out of his day to show me his land and offer an extempore analysis of the economics of family farms and sustainable agriculture that left me humbled and speechless.

He and his family moved to the mainland several years ago, but what was his farm (now owned by a retired doctor) backs up against the yard of my current rental—which I guess is why he’s on my mind. It was people like Lynn, and chef Leah Caplan (who I’m giving short shrift here, but more about her later), and Cathy, an EMT and bookkeeper who delivered eggs fresh from her hens to Leah every morning, and Kate, a painter who for years spent summers on an Alaska fishing boat and wintered on the island that stuck in my mind long after the snowplow driver accidentally clipped my poor Neon and after I’d eaten my fill of fried lawyers at KK Fiske and after I’d gone back to Chicago and written my story. I kept thinking to myself: there’s something more here.

(to be continued)