Journal of First Class at The Clearing in Door County, Wisconsin 1957

It was raining; rather hard after dinner, so again we gathered in the school.   We talked of migration, spoke of how a change in air pressure, a change in wind and temperature, would bring the birds.   Given a tail-wind from the south, they would come … at least in theory.   And still it rained, and the cold northeast wind blew, whipping the aspens and slashing the pines.

Later in the afternoon, we went by car, led by Harriet Platt and Mertha Fulkerson, across the peninsula to a wild, wind-swept, stormy sand beach where waves rolled in with a most satisfying sound of the sea.   It was a timeless, endless scene of waves rising and whitening and crashing on a barren shore.

As we stood there in the wind, we could see what has been unchanged since the first waves rose and broke on the first beach emerging in most ancient Archaic times.   Man and his works seemed unaccountably gone, trees and life itself were gone.   It was as if we stood on the sand and looked across gray water to a gray sky, with only rolling waves between infinity and us … as if we were on the brink of eternity, and could begin, just now, to comprehend it a very little.

On this beach at Newport, the Niagara Escarpment slants off to the depths of Lake Michigan.   Many more conifers grew along the sand shore than on the rocks of THE CLEARING.   There was a very different aspect of life and shore on this side of the peninsula.

And the wind blew bitterly cold as we followed a narrow path into the protection of tall white birches, and sought out the fallen-down ruins of an old log farm house and its outbuildings. The remaining clapboard shingles were heavily encrusted with lush moss and lichens, some green, some golden, some gray.

Huge Norway spruces, planted there long ago by a woman who loved trees and flowers, draped plumy boughs to the ground and were loaded with long cones.   And still only a few chilly birds sang or moved.

That evening, Dixie Larkin, ornithologist from Milwaukee, arrived in camp.   During her evening talk, a rousing thunderstorm echoed across the bay and flashed through the great window of the lounge.   And when we went out, ready for bed, a warmer wind was blowing, a gentle southerly wind, laden with perfume and . . . and high against a sky with its breaking clouds, there sounded remote, small bird voices . . . the birds were coming! They had got their tail-wind from the south!