Egg Harbor
Wednesday 11.02.22
We’re working from Door County for a few days and staying in Egg Harbor. I looked forward to trying the coffee shop The Chocolate Chicken for the first time, but they flew the coop for the off-season. With no chance to nest there, I walked through next-door Harbor View Park and admired the rooster sculpture by William Jacquet, ‘purchased from the proceeds of the 2014 EGGstravaganza’ according to the plaque. With all this egg talk, I belatedly wondered why it was called Egg Harbor. Though stories vary and no one knows the truth, the namesake might be an egg fight between racing trade boats. What a mess that had to be! I did make a feathered friend in Fish Creek, where Lucas and I sat at a picnic table by the lake for dinner. A seagull — let’s call her Betsy — waited twenty feet away for any leftovers, squawking occasionally to let us know we were taking too long. The odds were not in its favor, of course, as both Lucas and I are paragons of table manners and grace, but we must have sat in a misbehaving pocket of the universe where down is up and East is North and I’m a klutz, because I dropped half of my sandwich. No, I didn’t leave it all for Betsy, because I wasn’t sure what pesto, mayo, pickled onion, and tomato would do to a seagull’s gut, but I left her a bit of the plain bread despite its nutritional deficiency because she waited for ages.
Always More Books
I picked up a number of books at Ecology, a store in Sister Bay. A couple are gifts for others, so mum’s the word on those for now. But I purchased a few for myself. Every stop into Ecology has led me on vicarious journeys through other people’s travelogues and made me remember other books on my home shelves.
I purchased Dear Paris: The Paris Letters Collection on a different trip, a book of watercolor-illustrated letters, which inspired me to create these digital postcards. This trip, I picked up The Woman Who Fell From the Sky about a journalist’s year in Yemen, How to Make a French Family — the story of a Chicagoan marrying a French widower and moving to southwestern France, and Rhapsody in Green which details the garden exploits of the writer Charlotte Mendelson. While I look forward to all of these books, one consideration is that they are all — with the exception of Rhapsody in Green — written by white female authors in countries not their own and it’s of course important to also read books about those countries from their own citizens and other perspectives. I started to feel a little weird about it when I realized I picked up four books in this category, including the two I bought as gifts.
I started Rhapsody in Green, which is off-the-wall, somewhat salty (in a humorous way), and disturbingly relatable. I wish I could say I did not go browsing Gardener’s Supply after reading a hefty chunk of this, but that would be a lie. I did resist buying anything. For now. If Prairie Nursery hadn’t stopped shipping its beautiful native plants in deference to the growing cold, that would be another matter.
At the same time, I was strangely motivated to read a different travelogue already in my possession — Hitching Rides with Buddha. This book sat and waited for me for years like treasure forgotten and buried beneath other loot. I’m a sixth of the way through, but it is a delight so far. While I could have used the spluttering laughs it wrenched out of me earlier, reading it at this point in time seems meant to be. Not only did it make the nasty double-whammy of daylight savings time (why oh why do we do this anymore) and midterm elections easier, but I was fascinated by a passage about the lion-dogs guarding the torii gates of Shinto shrines and ah/un-no-kokyuu that connects thematically to the chapter of my book I’m working on.
Do you have a favorite travelogue — book, tv, or otherwise? Personal tv favorites are Travel Man with Richard Ayoade (We’re here…but should we have come?) and James May: Our Man in Japan. Staying in place during the height of the pandemic, these shows helped us remember what it felt like to be elsewhere.
