1969 "National Geographic" Article
By William S. Ellis
Photographs by Ted Kozumalski
DARKNESS CAME QUICKLY as wind and rain gusted out of the sky to wreck the drowsy
stillness of three o'clock on a warm summer afternoon. From atop a high limestone
cliff, I watched the waters of the strait below bunch up into swells and then become
driving beams of frothy fury. A skiff torn loose from it's mooring slammed into the
base of the cliff and backed off as kindling. Churning, whirling , bloated with arrogance,
this rip of water between a peninsula and the islands off its tip mirrored all the
gray grimness of the name given it by French explorers many years ago. Porte des
Morts, they called it - literally "Door of the Dead", but colloquially
translated "Death's Door". On its floor rest the bones of humdreds of ships.
The "Door of the Dead" washes against the tip of Wisconsin's Door Peninsula
(the name comes from that of the strait), a 70-mile-long shoot of land extending
from the eastern reaches of the state and bounded by Lake Michigan on the east and
Green Bay on the west.
The vista here is one of striking constrast of land and water locked together by
glaciers that receded thousands of years ago; of an acidlike surf sculpting a cove
in rock, while inland, less than 100 yards away, a placid lake nuzzles a beach of
white sand, of deer browsing amid wild wood lilies, and gulls in screeching pursuit
of a boat, hoping for a handout; of harbors throttled by ice, and countrside awash
in the pinks and whites of flowering fruit trees.
As an alien thumb of land on the corn-knuckled fist of the Middle West, the Door
Peninsula, with its 250 miles of shoreline, draws expressions of surprise from first-time