2006 We were lucky to get this motel, and they don't take dogs, but they say they will make an exception. It is the off-season, March, and no one goes up to Door County in March. They are happy to take our money, plus extra for the dogs. The weather was calm and sunny driving up here. Despite all the lighthouses in Door County, there will be no foghorns tonight.

2002 We are in a very nice room with antique furniture, a king sized bed and an indoor jacuzzi. There is not much of a view of the ocean, as this location is somewhat inland, nonetheless on one of the highest spots on the island. The window screens are clogged with the salt air, so we wouldn't be able to see much anyway. There is no way we could afford to stay at a place like this if it were not for the fact we were being allowed to stay here. We are probably the poorest people to have slept in this bed and bathed in this jacuzzi. Despite the fact that there is some nasty weather in the middle of this November on the northeastern shore, I do not remember the foghorn. I'm sure there must have been foghorns, but I can't remember them. Maybe it is the pitch. Maybe only the pitch of the Windpoint lighthouse fognorn could connect to my soul, a foghorn I heard since I was a baby, and then practically every summer afterward as I grew up.

196?/197?/1980 As I would lie awake at night before I went to bed, I would be sung to sleep by the traffic concert with its light show across the living room stage--the swoosh swoosh of the cars with the accompanying headlight whizzing by on the walls lulled me to sleep. This was so different from the noiseless places I lived, the country road in Massachusetts, the suburban loop in New York, the quiet neighborhoods in Colorado. But these city sounds were only the opening act. The true performer of the night, if he decided to make an appearance, was the foghorn, with his baritone warning to the ships on Lake Michigan. The foghorn came from the lighthouse a few miles away at Windpoint, a little ways north of Racine. This is near the land where my grandfather's parents settled. My grandfather, the 7th son of 7 brothers, who I do not remember as he died when I was about 2, supposedly inherited that farm, but sold it. To him, what good was land by a lake? What good was a college education? My grandfather was a farmer's son and a union worker, simple and short-sighted. Had he been more visionary, he would have kept the land. Since my mother is, like me, an only child, guess who would eventually inherit this land near the Windpoint lighthouse? You're reading her, but all I inherited from him was high blood pressure. Like my grandfather, I will probably be born, die, and be buried in Wisconsin, something neither my grandmother nor my mother can or will lay claim to. My grandmother was born in Czechoslovakia, died in Colorado and is only buried near her husband back in Wisconsin, where she spent most of her life. My mother was born in Wisconsin, but she will die and be buried in Colorado. And me, I was born in Racine and then moved around the US when I was a kid. Strange fate brought me back to this state. Maybe it's to haunt the land of my ancestors and to ask them, "why didn't you keep the land by the lake in the family?"

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