Journal of First Class at The Clearing in Door County, Wisconsin 1957
October 11, 2015
May 23. Thursday
Once more we woke to a gray day and light rain. We also woke to a curious clamor among the gulls. It was as if a school of fish had come in close to shore and the birds were gathering. Yet there was an impelling quality in their keening which urged us to hurry out and look . . . which we did . . . and were more puzzled than before.
The strong, sleek, white bodies of the herring gulls came coasting south on the wind above the cliffs, paralleling the peninsula. On set wings they followed one after another, as if in an ordered and planned procession, and uttered those cries which were somehow different in timbre than their daily screaming.
The gulls coasted over the white pines down the slope from the lodge, right at the rim of the bluff. And each gull paused above a tree. With legs apart, webs spread, wings hovering, not one alighted. After a long, poised moment, there was a sudden dip, and the gull flew off with a beakful of white pine needles. The next bird in line hovered, keening, for his own needle-picking, ceremony.
This was curious enough to observe, without knowing the cause of such odd activities. But Mertha Fulkerson, who knows most of the answers to puzzling questions pertaining to an area she has known intimately for twenty years, had the solution.
The gulls, she said, pick pine needles in the spring and carry them to their nests among the rocks of the islands out in (he bay and lake … pine needles . . . for their tonic properties, for comfort, for perfume . . . who knows, really, why the gulls fly in ceremonial procession on a misty morning in May to pick needles of the pines and carry them to nests far out on a rocky island?
After breakfast we met at the school for a brief botanical talk, and then, with raincoats and high anticipation, set off in the pleasant May drizzle by car for the Ridges Sanctuary over on the east shore near Bailey’s Harbor.
This was a completely different world than the one we had seen elsewhere in Door county. Here the successive ridges of dunes, progressing back from the water’s edge and the open, unstable, wave-beaten sands, had become more and more anchored by plants unique to the area. The young dune was still restless under the roots of Artemisia and sand cress, but farther back, ridge by ridge, lived an older and still older vegetation, taller trees, and, eventually, earth instead of sand for a footing.
We may see the Ridges many times, but surely no other moment will surpass the charm and mystery we knew on that first morning when, in the lightly falling rain, we entered the spruce bogs and iris acres of the Ridges Sanctuary. Moisture in the air clung in millions of silvery droplets to all the needles of the swamp spruces and white cedars, to the young pale clusters of needles of tamaracks, to moss and fern and sedge.
It was the sort of place to enter on light feet and in which to speak in hushed voices, as if there might be an unknown wilderness spirit who would be offended by our presence. We came