Door County
"The fish boil fire leapt six feet when they threw in the salt water, and the crowd stepped back as one, and I thought: this is exactly what a tradition should look like."
Door County is the name for a long finger of limestone that Wisconsin extends into Lake Michigan, creating the enclosed waters of Green Bay on one side and the open lake on the other. I arrived in early June, which is slightly before cherry season but well into the season of optimism — the orchards were in bloom on the hillsides above the bay, white flowers against the deep water, and every farm stand had a hand-lettered sign promising cherries in two weeks. I drove the county road along the bay shore with the windows down, and the smell coming in was that combination of cold fresh water and blossoming fruit trees that probably doesn’t have a name but should. There was a moment, somewhere south of Egg Harbor, when a bend in the road lined up so that the water and the cherry blossoms occupied the same frame, and I pulled over just to register it properly.
Fish Creek is the central town if you’re being architectural about it — Victorian storefronts on a bluff above a small harbor, galleries and restaurants and ice cream shops that know their audience but haven’t entirely sold out to them. The fish boil is the thing you must attend: a Door County tradition in which a huge kettle of whitefish, potatoes, and onions cooks over a wood fire outdoors, and at the climactic moment the cook throws salt water on the fire to create a boilover that removes the oil from the top. Crowds gather at Old Post Office Restaurant and White Gull Inn for this performance nightly in season, and the theater of it — the fire leaping six feet, the steam billowing, the crowd’s collective intake of breath and step backward — is genuinely fun, followed by genuinely good fish. Eat it with drawn butter and coleslaw and a slice of Door County cherry pie and you have eaten as locally as it is possible to eat in Wisconsin. The pie matters. It is the kind of tart cherry pie that makes the sweet versions you grew up with seem like something else entirely.
The county has more lighthouses per square mile than anywhere in the United States — ten of them, ranging from the trim white tower at Cana Island (reached by wading through shallow water or crossing a causeway depending on season) to the squat red Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal lighthouse at the inland edge. I spent a morning driving the lighthouse circuit, which is the kind of low-stakes, high-reward tourism that suits a peninsula not trying too hard. Ellison Bay at the northern tip is the quieter end — a small harbor with a summer theater company, a couple of galleries, a bar or two where locals and visitors have reached an unspoken détente about sharing the stools. From there the peninsula terminates at a ferry crossing to Washington Island, which is its own separate world of Icelandic-descended fishermen and roads that take you nowhere in particular, which is exactly what Washington Island is for.
When to go: Cherry season runs late June through July and is the sensory peak. September slows down beautifully; the fall colour along the bay shore is exceptional and the Peninsula Music Festival in August brings serious classical music audiences. Apple season extends into October — a very different, quieter Door County, and the better one if you dislike sharing a county road with four other cars.