You're one of them
As I was headed south a rider appeared just 100 meters ahead and I closed the gap just to say hello and comment on the weather. I was nearing home, but our route overlapped and we got to chatting. He commented that he'd moved over from the other side of the bay. I replied that I moved up after a 30 year career in Chicago and Suburbs.
"Oh. You're one of them."
You're one of them.
Door County has always wrestled with a quiet distinction between people born here and people who arrived later, the tourist boats came up the lake early on for the fresh clean air and people have never stopped coming. In a place shaped by tourism, agriculture, lumbering, ship building and generations of family history, the categories matter more than outsiders often realize.
There are positives living in a tourist region like this. The theater and arts scene is fantastic. The restaurants and food can be excellent, if with Chicago-prices. There's a solid brewery community, wineries, distilleries and taverns that make the long winters easier to pass. But this lives adjacent to the "local" community that often feels to run parallel to the ex-pats from Chicago, Madison and Milwaukee.
You're one of them.
Deep down I was angry, but being a Midwesterner I didn't let that anger escape. His question struck to my identity and the Homeric journey of 48 years to get home. I simply said:
I was born here.
The response was simply "oh", without question or apology. And the irony? He wasn't local either. He was from the other side of the bay!
I didn't grow up on the peninsula I call home. I was raised in German Valley, IL, population, at the time, 480. I didn't grow up with the bay and the lake and boating, fishing and hunting, but I grew up with small town, agriculture, and manufacturing. So coming home was an easy transition. I never belonged to the suburbs. I belonged here.
My roots go back to the 1870's and I'm now the 6th generation of Butlers that have worked or farmed on the peninsula. I still meet former students my father taught. I know where all of the family farms existed. I regularly ride by the one room school where my grandfather got perfect attendance in the early 1920's. I was recently asked by an older woman, "are you a Jacksonport Butler?" and I was able to respond with no small amount of pride, "Yes. Yes I am."
I don't quite have my origin story down pat when I'm meeting folks for the first time in the county. I stumble a bit when I need to establish my Door County bona fides, but my history runs back to West Jacksonport, to Canada, and back to Ireland.
There will be a Butler family reunion on the beach in Jacksonport this summer. The 7th and probably 8th generations will play in the lake just steps from the cottages that were "Butler" since the turn of the last century. The cyclist said "Oh, you're one of them." Yes. I'm one of them, just not in the way he meant.
