Midwest Memories

“Have you ate yet?” The voice called out from a small group gathered at a nearby campfire as I made my way toward the river in the gathering dusk. Before long we had joined Bruce, the source of the inquiry and a cook at the local Mexican restaurant, and the camping couple from South Carolina he was visiting for drinks and bacon-topped pork loin with carrots and potatoes, all wrapped in foil packets and roasted in the campfire. Visiting daughter, son-in-law and three kids drove up, and soon it was a party at the city campground on the St. Louis River in Cloquet, MN.
It was the beginning of our stay in the Midwest, whose residents proved to be consistently chipper, chatty and cheery. Where else would the gas station guy run ahead so he could open the door for you? Everyone seemed so genuinely nice.
North Dakota’s rain carried through to Minnesota, but we liked what we saw of Bemidji’s pretty residential neighborhoods. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was deep forest and gorgeous beaches that could double for the California coast, delicious Cornish pasties and signs that advertised “Bear Bait” down the road. (OK, it’s not Yellowstone, but still…)
We moved into Wisconsin and bought succulent smoked whitefish from the Halvorsen dock in Cornucopia, “Wisconsin’s northernmost village,” on the shores of Lake Michigan. The country was quintessential Wisconsin rural, with picturesque Scandinavian red barns, rolling fields of corn and grazing Holstein dairy cattle.
I eagerly awaited our entry into Door County, the thumb of Wisconsin’s mitten, and a place I remembered lovingly from family vacations a half-century ago. I braced myself for changes that weren’t shocking as I had anticipated. The road still passed through miles of orchards, the limestone soils of the peninsula producing notable cherries and apples. The little towns had condos now and modern inns, but the rustic cabins still remained, along with the skinny white church steeples and bobbing boats in the harbors. Ephraim’s drive-in and 100-year –old Wilson’s ice cream counter were still in operation. And every mailbox and business bore a Scandinavian name. My peeps! Perhaps my love of this place as a child had been genetic. I loved it even more now.
We camped in a sunny spot near the water surrounded by birches and maples in the very campground we’d camped in when I was a child. Little of the park looked familiar, but I remembered singular places, like the Eagle Tower built in the 1930s, which I again climbed to get a bird’s eye view of the islands in the bay and the town of Ephraim in the distance.
We took our bikes on the ferry across Death’s Door to Washington Island and peddled the length of the island, stopping for a local wheat beer at the oldest continually operating tavern in Wisconsin. We passed sun-dappled forests of maple and beech and sweetly pungent dairy farms under cobalt skies, visiting the beach of smooth limestone pebbles that sits on the same Niagara escarpment as the famed New York falls.
But the greatest shock of recognition was a stop at Gills Rock at the tip of the peninsula, where the waters of Green Bay meet Lake Michigan. I remembered coming here with my mother and buying smoked fish wrapped in butcher paper, eating the oily sardine-size chubs while sitting on the rocks and tossing the skins to the hovering gulls.
We stopped at the docks and talked to two men processing fish in a large building. I told them of my memory, of the little outhouse-size shack I remembered. “It’s still there, although it hasn’t been used in years,” they told me. I found the little shack of my memories, but the fish we bought at their store up the road was whitefish. The chubs of my childhood have become so rare they’re no longer fished.
Later in the day, we purchased fresh-off-the-tree Honeycrisp apples from grower Seaquist, who mixed comical tales of tourists in the orchard and histories of apple varieties in a delightful singsong Swedish accent.
Wisconsinites tend toward plump. Traditional fish boils are big in this neck of the woods, cheese curds are popular snacks and restaurants advertise specials like “old-fashioned pot roast.” But an ironic trend has appeared in the restaurants of America’s Dairyland – margarine. Virtually illegal when I was a kid, it was popping up everywhere in restaurants. And when we had Swedish pancakes with lingonberries at Al Johnson’s sod-topped restaurant with goats on the roof, the butter dish held not only margarine, but foil-wrapped pats of butter from Minnesota. Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast3MNMIWI?authkey=Gv1sRgCOSojOKV1aXjCg&feat=directlink