Mid-May

 

It was a long way back from Pittsburgh. I was driving along the Ohio River and thinking of projects past, refusing to use any phone navigation until I had been lost for some time. One minute the river was to my left, but quickly seemed to have turned into a drainage ditch. Where had the road gone?

 

Google maps was on. I did not yet own an atlas. A drive north meant Columbus, and then on towards Chicago, pulling into a little state park in the northwest corner of Ohio. It seemed to only exist because the government had claimed a section of the riverbank to keep in perpetuity near a small dam on the Maumee River. I was asleep at 1:00 am, under my comforter and wedged between suitcases in the back of my car.

 

The sun lifted the morning fog off the river, and I rose with it. At the edge of the dam a man was casting into the turbulent water and we spoke for a while. He gave tips for catching crappie from the river. He was, in many respects, a talented man. His talents for speaking were far better than fishing. Nevertheless, it was “My River,” and sometimes even “My Dam.” I received many tips for fishing for crappie in that river, including the insistence that I use a net first, since “if you can’t catch any minnows in a net it’s not worth going in with a line.” It did not seem to matter much that I had no fishing gear with me or that I would be leaving in fifteen minutes.

 

I cut across northern Indiana, headed for lake michigan. Before Chicago was a stop in the Indiana Dunes National Park. I do not know much about its history, but do think that it is certainly the most ‘American’ of all the national parks. Roosevelt, Muir, Wilson, and many others put pieces of their careers and even lives into the making of the parks system, which at the time seemed a uniquely brilliant and American idea - or certainly to Ken Burns at least. While his four part, eight hour documentary ends in the year 1933, the Indiana Dunes National Park was not established till 1966, snubbing them of any mention. Where then, does this American-ness come from? Not from individual genius or a transcendental landscape, but the opposite. The park was created where and when it was to preserve a thin band of wooded dunes along the Southern shore of Lake Michigan, and to surround in two parts The Port of Indiana, sometimes known as Burns Harbor. The Port is an incomprehensibly large metalworks plant first pushed by Bethlehem Steel which prompted the creation of the park.

 

On the drive in, it was easy to forget that this was a national park, or even a protected area at all. The road to the trailhead was also the road into the town of Dune Acres, a private town isolated and sprawling along the shore within the larger of the two fragments of the park. A gate, manned 24 hours, sits only to prevent the hiking riff raff from driving in too far and getting too close to any of the high value real-estate beyond the road’s next bend. “Cowles Bog Parking: Please Turn Right,” as if the gate left visitors with any other choice. “Stop.” “No Entry.” “24-Hour Camera Surveillance and Security.”

 

I took a short hike through the dunes to the shore. The birds and other hikers were well equipped for the sand. It filled my New Balance runners in under a half mile and did not find its way out for another half a month. The hike, while short, left behind all the worries that come with the city, the highway, the lake, and even the manned gate at the trailhead, but my focus was on the other end of the path.

 

After a long, slow climb, the trail reaches the top of the dunes just before they begin their steep descent towards the water’s edge. Trees and sand and water and sky nearly take up the hiker’s entire field of vision, but is the last thing they notice. Instead it is the tips of the smokestacks of the harbor, its rocky pier, and piles of debris and raw material along the fence that demand interest. While passing factories of this scale on the highways of Gary and Whiting, their presence seems impossible and fantastical. It is not until they are seen between the beach and the dunes that for the first time for non-residents they become real. Cresting the ridge of the dunes on the shoreline for the first time brought those factories from the realm of images and stories and industry into the real world.

 

A long walk along the shore takes one to the shallow, grass covered dunes between the shore and the base of the factories, nearly 500 feet from the water. I made this long walk, feeling my pale arms turn slowly red before I even met the end of the beach, where a 20’ rock wall registers the ‘city limits’ of Burns Harbor. I spent some time at the end, but it was mostly just staring at the water and the sun and the dunes and the factories, where things only ever seemed to happen between the twelve minute intervals when a nearby furnace let out a low growl and puff of steam. I walked along the ridge of the foredunes on my way back towards the trail, but was soon sidetracked when I countered, hidden between two small hills, a young couple. The woman was asleep on her back, but her friend heard my approach, and, lying on his stomach, looked up, smiled, and nodded. I would have loved to talk, but I left them to sit there and tan, since they seemed to have found what then felt like the most perfect place in the world to lay naked in the late spring sun.

 

At 75 degrees and with a slight breeze coming in off the lake it really did feel like the perfect place for almost anything. There was a tension there, simple but powerful, made available in the way the same rolling waves broke on the same empty beach that sits in the shadow of both the tree-topped dunes and the smokestack-topped factories. Some sat in the shadows taking pleading calls from families, and others sat to watch the waves. There had been an ornithological conference in the park a week prior, and only the most dedicated bird-watchers remained. A group was on a Chariots of Fire beach run, and on my way back, a group of schoolchildren were on a summer expedition, and were being documented by a crew of 4, manned with cameras and microphones and even a drone, and seemed to be as enamored with the harbor as everybody else. I think for this reason it is the most American, and one of the most moving national parks.

 

- C

6/19/2023