This is why
I love the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and many other hidden remnants of
the remarkable natural landscape that once stunned the early French explorers
with its wildness and wonder.
I’d heard
about Miller Beach for years as a frequent explorer of the Indiana Dunes and
the surrounding prairies and marshes. Looking on a map, I’d often wondered just
what was adjacent to the humungous US Steel Gary Works. I’d visited the actual
beach and the Paul Douglas Environmental Center and walked around the marshes
there but never thought to venture further, knowing that the land might be
mostly residential or compromised by the years of industrialization. Like many
who’ve explored these heavy industrialized areas, I’ve learned not to be surprised
at what to expect.
I asked for
a map at the resource center, but the ranger said they didn’t have one, but
that she’d mark it on my map. This was a good sign, I thought, or was it?
Off I went
through the golden leafed black oak savannahs with the familiar sounds of the
south shore line rocketing through the little Gary suburb of Miller Beach,
preparing me for the usual hiking experience at the Dunes where you’re never
far from the realities of this post-industrial landscape. The marshes were
browning and choked as usual with the invasive hybrid cattail.
Then, I came
to a trail that led off the marked Miller Woods Loop trail. This trail dipped, meandered
and then came to what I guess is the west end of the new Marquette Trail. The trail
is an old rail bed. As I looked right
and left, the trail became a tunnel of golden leaves with scarlet sumac along
the banks. The sun, the warmth of the day, and sudden flood of color jolted me
awake. It was fall, wasn’t it? In the
city, you recognize that the trees are changing and the days are getting
shorter and cooler. But it’s a passing thought as you get on a train or go about
your busy life. In natural settings, however,
color sharpens and soothes some quality of perception that we can’t access in
the manufactured settings most of us inhabit. I hike for these moments of
perceptual shock when natural color bombards the back of my retina and bursts
the dull patterns of my mind.
I half
thought of walking down this straight path to see where it led. But I wanted to
follow this Miller Beach Trail.
The trail weaves
by several marshes, nestled between the old dunes. Some a few acres, some opening out into
shallow ponds surrounded by grasses and cattails, where I startled a couple of
blue herons and noticed gold finches and other migrants but I couldn’t ID them.
I was still, as usual, too much in a hurry. How many little marshes are out
here? I followed the trail up a small
dune and then down, and through the foliage, I caught a glimpse of a rich, ultramarine
blue. The Lake? Already? No, it was one of the several lagoons particular to this
unique dune and marsh landscape. It’s not small, maybe 10 acres, and completely
surrounded by trees. I stopped and for a
moment, I had to remember, that I was at the Dunes and Gary was a few miles to
the south and west. I crossed a newly built little wooden foot bridge that
protects the wetlands and connects the western lagoon to the eastern one, where
I could see some of the homes in Miller Beach.
I climbed
around another dune and there was another shallower pond with a horseshoe set
of dunes towering over it. And around its edge, my first industrial sight,
marring the landscape: what a mess, trees half chopped down, branches piled up
in the water, damming up the water’s natural flow, ah, the old beaver had been
hard at work. And there, too, is a flock of ducks, wood ducks with their clean
forest green markings.
I wasn’t even close to the beach and I’d
walked at least a mile. So of course, I climbed the dune, at a pitch that made
me have to hold on to tufts of purplish blue stem grasses. Dune hiking is not
for the unsteady or the impatient, I always have to remember. So I angled up to
make it easier, but I still fell back and nearly tumbled back on my ass into
the water. One thing, though, about dune
hiking you can’t ever really get hurt, unless fall into a patch of cockleburs
or poison ivy.
On top, I
finally got a glimpse of the lake, but I still had another half mile to the
beach. To the right is unfortunately the sign of the sad history of the area,
an unnatural plateau, bulldozed sand mixed in with the waste of years of steel
production. The natural undulation of the dune procession is gone. I moved on though I’m on my own, as there’s no
real trail to follow. Ahead I saw the remains of a fence, buried up to its
barbed wire, by the moving dunes of the past ten to twenty years. I push
through brush, golden rod, aster, little blue steam, with a few old stunted
black oaks sticking out of the sand.
There is something arresting to these old dead trees littering the
dunes, charred black against the sallow sand, sand cherries, spreading wild
grape and grasses hanging on the slopes. Death turned into sculptural relics. I spotted some pink ribbons and followed them.
It’s a surreal landscape, these dunes of
Lake Michigan and the multiple environments that survive here. Nowhere else in
the world can one find this unique mix of North America’s diverse environments,
prairie, wetlands, woodlands, desert, boreal remnants of the ice age.
I stepped
over the fence. One more dip around a hybrid cattail clogged marshy area and I
could see the lake and the rolling foredunes before it. The foredunes are young
and form a swale that parallels the beach, all filled with grasses and golden
rod. The little valley extends at least a mile right and left, and at the
western end, there it is the grand mountain of industrial Gary—the chimney
stacks and behemoth metal barn that comprises Gary’s integrated steel works. Out
into the lake a long spit juts out into lake, and then further west the
silhouette of gargantuan Arcelor Mittal and other US Steel plants, British
Petroleum’s largest Midwestern refinery and all the rest of it. It’s always
dramatic, and unsettling, no matter how many times you hike at the Dunes. You
know it’s coming even as you get lost in the surreal dunes, marshes, woodlands,
and ponds, there they are—the other half of the Lake Shore. And then, of
course, there was Chicago, almost an afterthought, a thin shadow in the
distance, a ghost of the great city, that disappeared as I climbed to the last
dune ridge lined with youthful sycamore. And then, I landed on a wide clean empty beach
that stretched to the spit and back northeast to Miller Beach, a good mile or
more of empty smooth sand.
I stopped to
stare and admire the expanse of the lake and its beach. Surveying the lake and
the open sky always stuns my mind for a few moments. I don’t know why. I live
by the lake, in Rogers Park, there’s rarely a day that doesn’t go by and I
don’t find myself on the beach there, walking, swimming, running, stopping and
staring out. But when you hike up and over dunes for a couple of hours, there’s
always a surprise at how magnificent the lake really is. Why is this? Why do we
need to earn it first on foot, moving from the old dunes to new, walking through
history as recorded in these changing ecologies?
