The Long View: Walking along the shores of Point Reyes

Point Reyes National Seashore, California

“Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.”  John Berger

               
When my cousin, Don, asked me where I wanted to walk while I was visiting him in the Bay Area, I had only one answer: Point Reyes. I’d first saw those redwood forests, undulating hills of scrub, those cliffs and long beaches, while camping with my parents in the sixties, and then again in college when for a time I lived in Berkeley. In my mind, I have held images of those vast stretches of coastal lands though no doubt they have merged with other coasts and seascapes I’ve seen in my travels. Seeing them again has made me wonder why it is that we find such pleasure in gazing at expanses of land and water.  

                The first few days in the Bay Area, my eyes began to adjust to the sights of the sea and the hills. Driving about, walking up and down the streets and through the parks in San Francisco, the eye must take in more and more than in the Midwest. The landscape has layers, and a simple glance offers a foreground and then seemingly an expanding background, as the horizon takes you further and further away from the place where you are. There’s a visual hiccup for those not used to the vistas, and I had to stop and adjust my glance, once tripping on a curb as I was struck by the clouds filling in the bay and covering the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s not that street life in San Francisco or Berkeley isn’t interesting, but again and again I found myself drawn to the longer view.  

                At Point Reyes, I was lost in conversation with my cousin as we meandered through the succession of plant communities toward the hidden shore.  When I wasn’t thinking of what my cousin was saying, I was thinking of how easily conversation can come sometimes while walking with those we know well. Subjects and emotions emerge from the land and silences naturally arise between bends along the trail and glances off into the hills and foggy skies. The randomness of ideas and memories bring relief to our scripted inner stories and concerns, and there’s such a relief in that.

                I thought, too, of just feeling my body walking; something that I’ve learned to do, knowing walks are rare and our steps through landscapes are finite. The sensations of walking in a given land are like a certain musical score that I have to listen to very carefully to appreciate.

                And then, there it is, the seascape, immediately arresting my inner monologue as I was thinking of something to say to my cousin. I stopped. Began to walk, and stopped again.  Thought of taking a photograph, but then let my eyes succumb to the seductive powers of the vistas of land and sea. The eye moves or is pulled to far reaches of distant forms—cliffs or rocks in the sea or banks of fog lifting over the golden hills, then the eye runs along the curve of the shore, like a child having to experience the entire length, and when you finally feel yourself take a breath, you notice the careening gulls break the static picture or realize that only a few yards before you a bush is of a color you’ve never really seen before. The whole landscape seems to have been illuminated and infused with energy, making you think that up until now you’ve been walking like some kind of zombie.    What happens when we see these vast spaces open and open out before us?  What causes us to feel so alive? Is it the sea and our ancient memories of it? Is it the liberation of our gaze? Is it that our perceptual organs are more fully tested? Is it that the visual data is so vast and nuanced that the mind must break its patterns of seeing and analyzing? Or is it the light itself that magically alters something within us, making us feel or imagine the space with its color and texture within our body.  

                I’ve often hiked among the Dunes in Indiana for something of the same feeling: that moment of perceptual shock, when the vast blue of Lake Michigan spreads literally as if we are creating it, flooding the flatness with our eyes, the water taking us to the far ends of the horizon as we stand on top of the two-hundred foot dunes. We have little topographical variation here in the Midwest, so these moments while hiking are rare and wonderful. It’s not the same looking out your condo window on the 45^th floor in Chicago, as enjoyable as it is. The view must be there before the naked eye. We must feel ourselves apart of the landscape.  There once were miles of dunes along the Lake, some towering as high as 300 feet, but of course these lands were sacrificed to industry and the political careers of men when the park was created not long after Point Reyes. (Both are National Parks devoted to America's shores.)  And I thought about this, taking in the miles of unobstructed views in this National Seashore of Point Reyes, and how valuable it is to walk and gaze and expand our limited horizons.

EARTH DAY REVISITED

 “It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.”   Rachel Carson      

I’d just wanted to get outside, walk, and feel the promise of spring.  For those urban apartment dwellers, spring comes in other people’s yards and in little corners of wilderness like the miracle of Montrose Beach.  And that’s where I headed that April day last year.  Pulling into the park, I could see teams of adults in green t-shirts in the wooded bird sanctuary, and further out on the beach, kids were dragging trash bags through the sand.  And then it dawned as on me, I’d stumbled into Earth Day. 

It was an awkward moment. If anyplace in Chicago deserved a hand, it was the marvel of Montrose Beach’s bird sanctuary and its reemerging dunes and rare wetlands habitat. Where else in the city could you spot piping plovers and red fox while listening to the rustle of the dune grasses, then in this monument to the will of nature and the passion of people to preserve it?  I considered sifting through the junk in my car for a plastic bag and joining in, but I let it go.

I walked around, trying to spot some of the spring migrating birds, but invariably I’d see these school kids, gleaning what they could after the fastidious Sierra Club folks. They reminded me of my friends and I picking up bottles and trash on that first Earth Day forty years ago in 1970.  Within an hour or so, our sacks were filled. We had no idea how much trash there was embedded in the grass and soil along the highway outside of our central Indiana factory town. They were too heavy to drag home, the bags, so we just left them there.  And that’s where they stayed, for months. 

I got back in my car, a bit guilty but inspired by those kids and the idea of Earth Day as embodied there at Montrose. And instead of going about my usual Saturday routines, I decided I’d make a pilgrimage of sorts a bit further down the shore of Lake Michigan, to another miracle of urban wilderness, another emblem of the spirit of Earth Day, the Indiana Dunes.

For a long time, if I had a desire to get away or enjoy the natural world, I’d get on a plane or drive far from the smokestacks and concrete of Chicago’s Lakefront. But economic times have been tough, so I have been exploring by foot places I’d driven by for years in and around Chicago.

I drove through South Chicago and the industrial cities of Indiana where I could stop and walk along beaches or abandoned railroad beds to see birds and the budding of spring, but it seemed fitting to revisit Cowles Bog in the National Lakeshore on the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day.  This section of the park is named after the pioneering work of botanist Henry Chandler Cowles of the University of Chicago, who spent years studying the dynamics of the dunes and how the climatic forces affected the plants and animals which inhabited them.  From Cowles’ work and others we can’t ignore the fact that all life forms—including us—are dependent on the health of the web of life around us.  A field of science emerged from the sand dunes of Indiana: it’s called ecology.

Cowles Bog with Steel Mill and NIPSCO in backgound

But the places where Dr. Cowles and his students made their discoveries are now gone, bulldozed, and turned to industrial use.  A loss, for sure, but in the battle for the dunes and in other places around the globe a voice emerged, a voice from local people who understood in their own way how their health and that of their children’s depended upon the health of their environment. And it’s for them, on Earth Day, that you want to thank for laws that give us cleaner air and water and parks like the Indiana Dunes.  

The trail to the beach at Cowles Bog took me along railroad tracks with a long line of coal cars ready to be burned into digital joy or used to form ore and stone into steel. Underneath crackling electrical lines, I marched on, noticing the mallards in the marshes oblivious to me and the steam billowing from the stacks. I climbed up the old dunes now covered in an oak forest and then made it down into the foredunes, where I walked to the shore through the same grasses now emerging on the beach at Montrose.