The other Door County


September 21, 2008|By Lauren Viera, TRIBUNE REPORTER

WASHINGTON ISLAND, Wis. — There's a reason Door County is so popular among Chicago-area weekend warriors: It's lovely. There are antiques to hunt, cherries to pick and fish to boil; there's a breeze, trees and B&Bs. For nature-deprived city folk who've been holed up with cubicle fever all summer, Door County is ridiculously appealing, primarily because it's everything Chicago is not.

But with popular destinations come crowds, and with crowds come traffic. Fortunately, Door County doesn't stop where most tourists do: to gawk at the goats grazing on the roof of Al Johnson's Swedish Restaurant, causing a traffic jam where Wisconsin Highways 42 and 57 bottleneck into Sister Bay. Geographically, it's almost as if Door County's eponymous peninsula is pointing the most perceptive of observers in the direction of something even better than those crazy goats. Positioned 4 miles off the tip of the peninsula, creating a water passage so dangerous, its infamous name -- Death's Door -- has stuck for centuries, there's a remote mass of land that lures the wisest of those weekend warriors to stow away to its shores.

One caveat: Washington Island is not tropical. But it is a kind of paradise.

What it lacks in coconut palms and white-sand beaches, it makes up for in wild sweet peas and nature trails. In place of tortoises and dolphins, there are lake whitefish and lawyers (fish, not suits). Ordering a mai tai is a faux pas, but every restaurant and pub serves Capital Brewery's Island Wheat Ale, brewed from wheat grown on most of the farms here.

Best of all, Washington Island is still Door County, so there remain the antiques, cherries and fish boils -- sans crowds, sans traffic.

Spanning just about 24 square miles, Washington Island is the largest of six islands off Door Peninsula that together make up the Town of Washington. Keep in mind, though, nobody ever says, "I'm headed up to Washington this weekend," reason being that the town is virtually synonymous with the main island. It's the only truly populated one (home to about 700 people) of those that lay in a haphazard archipelago here. The others -- Rock Island (1.5 square miles), Detroit Island (0.99 square miles), Plum Island (about 0.5 square miles) and teeny-tiny Pilot and Hog Islands (each about 2 acres) -- are, quite literally, for the birds: Rock Island is a deserted state park, perfect for lakeside camping, and the others are bird sanctuaries.

A few miles north, Green Bay and Lake Michigan swirl together along an invisible Wisconsin-Michigan border. The time zone jumps from Central to Eastern and the waters widen, distancing themselves from the collective islands' notorious natural roadblocks.

In primitive seafaring days of yore, many of the ships that tried to pass between Wisconsin's jagged peninsula and Washington Island -- a.k.a. Death's Door Passage -- simply didn't make it. There are remnants of shipwrecks. Hundreds of 'em. Door County's Visitors' Bureau likes to brag that there are more shipwrecks here than any other section of fresh water in the world. During the warmer months, divers flock to Death's Door to go deep, exploring what's left of the legendary wreckage. And during the winter, chunky ice caps clutter the passage, reminding passengers on the Washington Island Ferry (also known as Death's Door Ferry) that, in all honesty, the 6-mile crossing is entirely in the hands of the elements.

The allure of an island is often weighed by how difficult it is to get there. But while Wisconsin's relatively unknown retreat is an easy six-hour drive from the Loop, its vibe isn't unlike that of Washington state's remote San Juan Islands or the smaller islands of Hawaii. Life moves slowly here. Cars cruise at a snail's pace, their drivers pausing for scenic snapshots; families of cyclists rule the dozen or so roads that divide the island's interior into a neatly planned grid. Many shops are open seasonally -- or when they feel like it. There's one ATM machine; there are two gas stations. People here stop to smell the wildflowers and take in the sunsets.

And, as is the case on any island, weather dictates just about everything. Get here in the next month or so, and Washington Island is at its prime, before dropping temperatures and fall color succumb to early winter gales. Especially on the northern and western sides, which face relatively balmy Green Bay, dips in the water are a must.

Pack a picnic and head to rocky, limestone-laden Washington Harbor and Schoolhouse Beach, which, on a recent Sunday afternoon, was populated by half a dozen or so lazy swimmers and sunbathers.

Cut through the woods on a trail from South Shore Drive to the remote Sand Dunes Beach, bring a book and a blanket and plant yourself against the shelf of sand overlooking Lake Michigan. There will be no crowds, if there's anyone there at all.