Geekrant vs the Youngish Man and the Sea

Greetings Geekranters!

I’ve lived in the Upper Midwest and more specifically the friendly and welcoming state of Wisconsin for nearly 4 years now. In fact it will the 4th anniversary of my moving here on September 20^th, just in case you wanted to know. Its a funny thing, that while I feel welcomed here in Wisconsin and may actually fit in better with the laidback attitude people have here than I ever did back home, I still spent 32 years of my life living in the United Kingdom and we are all, in some ways, products of the places we’re from.

Over the last week, my wife and I have spent a delightful time at a small cabin on the shores, that is to say, right on the beach, of Lake Michigan. We have spent a wonderful 5 days away from much of the stress of our everyday lives in the wonderful Door County, Wisconsin’s easternmost county. We have listened to great live music, been to multiple wine and distillery tastings, met up with friends, eaten some great food and generally had a whale of a time. Whales bring me to a slight problem though. 

Door County is the county that covers the vast majority of the Door Peninsula; A long, relatively thin, finger of land that protrudes from the eastern side of Wisconsin into Lake Michigan. At one point it was a true peninsula, but once they built a canal through it, it can be argued that, despite its name, it is now an island. I have spent 5 days surrounded by water, for a man born of an island nation, I should have enjoyed every minute of it, and I did, with the exception of the hitherto unforeseen problem… Lake Michigan isn’t the sea and I find that like a pod of whales lost in shallow waters and caught in a river’s mouth, I miss the sea.

Water has always defined my life and, in truth, the life of all my countrymen. It seems to me that whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not, we are island people, our boundaries set by the mighty waters. In purely historical terms, our prominence as a nation was founded upon our mastery of the waves and our exploration of the furthest reaches of Neptune’s aquatic empire.

The vast majority of the days of my life have been spent living less than 40 miles from the sea, and although I never thought much about the ocean from day to day, it was always there. Somewhere, just down the road, lay the sea, two train stops away and all you needed was a spare day to get away for a while and feel the salt spray on your skin and feel renewed. 

Over the last few years I have to admit that I’ve grown quite fond of Wisconsin and it has, in its own way, become just as much home as the place I grew up ever was. It may have taken some time but I’m as happy here as I was in the land of my birth. That’s not to say that I don’t get homesick. There are a myriad of tiny things that like Chinese water torture can build up and build up until I find that I want to rail at the entire US population about spelling things the correct English way or to tell them that I don’t need news anchors with perfect teeth to tell me how I should feel about current affairs. 

Still these are minor things, things that distract from the larger, more existential, questions that building a life in such a different place from where you began can bring. 

Wisconsin is about at far from an ocean or sea as you can get in the Continental United States, even in desert states like Arizona, Nevada or New Mexico, people have less drive-time until they can stare out into the never-ending blue of the ocean until it merges with the sky along the hazy smudge which is the horizon. Wisconsin is full of beautiful forests, lakes as calm as glass under the early morning sun and the most successful team in NFL history*. Its full of spectacular wildlife, hidden places of beauty that take your breath away and, in all honesty, a lot more bars than a state of 5 million people probably needs.

The one thing it doesn’t have is the sea. Ah! The Sea how I miss thee, let me count the ways! When I was a child on at least one occasion, they had to drag me out of the near freezing sea under slate grey clouds threatening to break and pour a deluge down upon us. Even though my mother says that the first time I sat on a beach I cried relentlessly, as only a toddler can, at the sound of the surf, I miss the sea.

So, when we go on vacation/holiday, my wife (who plans such things, a hundred times better than I do) takes into account my desire for a maritime intermission in the middle of our journey, despite the fact that she’s in love with forests and whimsical paths that curve through the woods and not so much enamoured with acres of blue stretching off into the distance. She tries to find me an oasis of the nautical variety.

 Last year, we journeyed down much of the length of the Pacific Coast and saw some of the most sensational seascapes and beautiful beaches that I have ever seen, but this year, having bought a house in December, we have less money to spend on losing ourselves in the wilderness of the Lost Coasts of America and so she found the next best thing, or what a Mid-Westerner bought up a thousand miles away from the sea would think of the next best thing. Lake Michigan and Door County.

Door County is an interesting place. Geologically it sits on the escarpment, which seems to be the scientific term for a really large and long cliff, that Niagara Falls pours over on the other side of the Great Lakes, which is called, unsurprisingly “The Niagara Escarpment”. It also has a strange feeling of isolation to it, not a bad feeling, but a realisation that while most of Wisconsin and the Mid-West, is tied to the patterns of the earth and the seasons of the farming year, that Door County, historically at least, is defined by the times and tides of its mini sea, Lake Michigan. 

America, as a whole, I find, is a world of contradictions. On the one hand, it can feel like a monolithic place, a giant cultural leviathan spreading American culture and ideas around the world through Hollywood and the American recording industry. A collective thinking with one mind about things, “E Pluribus Unum”, “out of many, one.”. On the other hand, it can feel like a myriad of different communities, an infinity of different ideas, a universe of different worlds unique from one another. My life here often feels like a journey of understanding and experience to reconcile the conflicting sides of the United States within my own heart and mind, while still working out what it means to be a British man, lost in a sea of Cheeseheads. 

Door County is a world all of its own. This is the place, culturally speaking where New England meets the Mid-West. This is definitely Wisconsin and the people here are as in love with good dairy, good cheese curds and good beer as much as anywhere else in the Badger State, however, once you take into account its seafood, the waves crashing upon rocks and its huge amount of lighthouses in such a small space of land, you might be forgiven for thinking you’d slipped through a wormhole somewhere and ended up in Maine or Massachusetts. 

The small villages, that hug the line of the quiet bays and serve as magnets to droves of tourists in the summer months, feel like they’re exactly the place you could imagine the Kennedys having a second compound, that JFK wouldn’t seem out of place strolling down the street in a nice preppy shirt and sweater combination, Tommy Hilfiger could film ads here and the Great Gatsby could still hold a killer party.

Driving the backroads though, is pure Wisconsin. If there’s one thing that Wisconsin seems to do better than anywhere else that I’ve ever been in the world, its in making use of the fruits of its labours. This is a state that has perfected the art of the farm store. We hardly seem to be able to drive a mile before coming to a farm store with seemingly endless amounts of fresh produce and preserves, meats and eggs. One boasted that they stocked over 500 different types of craft beers, another still sold perfect jams and jellies. Every other town seemed to have a local winery with associated wine tasting and a place to sit by the lake and just enjoy the scenery.

It was a wonderful place to visit. We ended up staying in a small cabin right on the shores of Lake Michigan and the sound of the waves sweeping in and out was soothing to the soul. There was a stillness there, away from the hustle and the harsh lights of the city that made a thousand stars you never knew existed be visible and our thoughts and dreams be amplified in the silence punctuated only by the inexorable crashing of the surf. 

Still though, for all this place felt wonderful and I felt that we had been blessed with a nearly moment in time, I am still a child of an island nation and Lake Michigan isn’t the sea. We are all so much a product of every experience that we have in life and often it seems that we can’t escape from our beginnings. I find myself asking God if this will always be the way it is. That living in Wisconsin, while it is my adopted home, will always have something missing that the place I left had, something primal, something gained from cultural osmosis when I was very young. “Genius Loci”, they say in Latin, “the spirit of the place”. I don’t have an answer yet but as I remember the water crashing on the beach outside the cabin, I know two things, I still miss the sea and Wisconsin is definitely trying to make up for it.

*To all Patriot, Steeler, 49er and Cowboy fans out there, you can't erase half a century of success just because they happened before the Superbowl era. So the Pack are still 7 championships ahead of the most successful of all of you. Just an important editorial point that needed to be made.