Write About A Time You Were Trapped by Weather...

Once I was travelling to Washington Island, Wisconsin, with friends.  In January.  Washington Island is the island off the tip of the Door County peninsula.  Imagine Wisconsin as a mitten, Door County is the thumb that juts between Lake Michigan and Green Bay.  Why the name Door County?  It could be a doorway to recreation, or rest.  But it comes from the French, Porte des Mortes.  Literally, “the door of the dead”. 

It refers to all the wrecks that have occurred in that passage between the peninsula and the island, starting probably with the local Native Americans.

That fateful January day we were heading to visit friends on the island.  In the summer the car ferries run all day, back and forth, on the forty five minute trek.  The six mile by six mile island, home to several hundred residents, swells to several thousand in the summers.  But, in the winter there is only one ferry a day.  One day it runs to the island.  The next day, it returns.

That day it was blowing and frigid, and we set out from the peninsula to the island. As we boarded the ferry we could see masses of ice pressed up against the shore.  Jagged pieces jutting this way and that.   Lake Michigan pitched us this way and that as we chugged out into the icy waters. Twenty minutes out, the ferry stopped.  We had become frozen into the ice.  We were stopped.  The island ferries are not ice cutters, so they can only slide up on top of the ice and crush it underneath.  But this day, it was too cold, we were too slow, and the way the wind was blowing, we froze in.

We were stuck.  Trapped.  Surrounded by ice.  The blue-white chunks pressing into the ferry.  What if help couldn’t get to us? How long could we last?  There is a story in Washington Island’s history, 1935, where part of the high school basketball team plunged into deadly, frigid waters while driving across the ice.  This is still a deadly stretch. 

Our thoughts turned to rescue.  And, survival.

As I tell this story, my friend asks:  “Did you have heat?”

“Well, yeah.”

 “Food and water?” she asks.

 “Yeah.  I guess.”

 “Bathrooms?”

 “Yeah.”

 “So, what happened next?”

 “Well, the, uh, wind shifted and blew some of the ice out.  We made it to the island, uh, a few hours late.  Actually, four hours late.  Crazy, eh?”

 “Yeah.  So you weren’t really in any danger?”

 “Well, we could have died, I suppose.  Coincidentally.  You never know.  There was a lot of potential.  Life is risky.”

 “I see. Well, that’s quite a story,” she says.

 

“Well, did I mention we saw a Bald Eagle swoop down and snatch a duck out of the water?  That’s pretty in-your-face wilderness.  Dangerous  stuff.”

“Yeah.”

This friend does not take my harrowing tale seriously.  She blows it out of the water.  But, it’s the best I’ve got.  It is my personal “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” yarn, or as close as I will probably get.  I can’t help it I’m surrounded by safety belts, guard rails, and front and rear bumpers. 

Porte des Mortes, not so much.  But, I could tell you a hundred tales of Porte d'inconvénients.