This story was first published by the Center for Humans & Nature on 9/6/16.
Where are all the people? I had to wonder. Here I am, I
thought, an hour from the Chicago Loop. It is the centennial anniversary of the
National Park Service. I’m in a national park in the midst of the third largest
metropolitan region in the country. The lake is so calm the horizon appears
solid as a polished granite countertop. Soft sand sifts between my toes. And I
have it all to myself.
I am amazed and saddened in equal measures by this observation.
It is the first of many contradictions I would sense in this extraordinary
place.
I came to honor “America’s best idea.”1 The
National Park Service was officially created on August 25, 1916. Excitement
about the centennial has been building all year. My current experience
notwithstanding, visits to national parks all over the country have seen a
surge due to all the attention. A capstone commemorative event is to be held today,
August 25, 2016, at Yellowstone, the nation’s first park.
I couldn’t easily get to Wyoming so I mark the occasion by
visiting a much more local national park. While there are two national parks in
Wisconsin, they are in the far northwest corner of the state.2 The
closest to Milwaukee, where I live, is here at the Indiana Dunes National
Lakeshore, some 150 miles away. I set out in the early hours of the morning to
try to catch the sunrise—and also to avoid rush hour in Chicago.
I’d planned the trip on impulse, booked a hotel near the
park for a night. But I didn’t think to check the weather before I left. I make
it to the beach on time, but the sky isn’t in a celebratory mood. A bank of
clouds rolls in and I find myself walking in the rain. No matter. The foliage
glistens and the color is so intense I feel like I’m bathing in viridian. The
light drizzle seldom breaks through the forest canopy.
Yes, there are forests at the Dunes. Although the
predominant feature of the park is the eponymous shore of Lake Michigan, with
beaches and sandy dunes that reach as high as 126 feet, the terrain behind the
beachfront is surprisingly varied. Park literature touts its forests, marshes, ponds,
bogs, rivers, oak savannas, and even remnant patches of prairie.
The idea that so many distinct habitats can be found in such
close proximity might sound like the overactive imagining of a national
lakeshore marketing team. Until you take a close look at a large map. The fat
thumb of Lake Michigan pokes straight into one of the most complex ecosystems
on the continent. The Great Lakes watershed at the southern edge of the
northern boreal forest intersects at this point with two other major
continental ecosystems, the eastern temperate deciduous forest and the vast
prairies of the Great Plains. I am a bit dumbfounded when I read that the
Indiana Dunes “has the third highest plant diversity
of any national park.”3
Diversity is clearly evident, beyond varieties of
vegetation, as I drive between Gary and Michigan City on the roughly 25-mile stretch
of Route 12 known as the “Dunes Parkway.” Heavily used commuter and freight
rail lines parallel the road. Small communities and large factories interrupt
the woodlands, wetlands, and prairies. The eastern tip of the park is
punctuated by the cooling tower of a coal-fired power plant that looms over
Mount Baldy, the tallest dune.
In contrast to 1916, when parks often were carved from a
seemingly limitless landscape, in 2016 many of them have become protected islands
engulfed by oceans of development and private enterprise. Indiana Dunes
National Lakeshore is an extreme example of this phenomenon. It is an
archipelago of disconnected public lands of varying size intermingled so
inextricably with private properties, both residential and heavy industrial,
that it’s hard to predict when you’re going to see a house in the woods or a
steel mill around the bend.
In fact, it was a steel company that enabled the creation of
the park in the first place. By the early twentieth century, much of the shore
lands—including Gary, Indiana, and the south side of Chicago—had already been
developed for industrial use. On one of my hikes overlooking the lake, I stop
to read one of the many helpful interpretive signs. Most explain natural
features or historical changes in the evolving landscape. This one reveals the
compromise that is at the heart of the park, that established its intimate
relationship with its urban, industrial surroundings.
There had long been efforts to preserve some of this unique
and important ecosystem. But it was the desire of the steel industry for a new
port that finally made it possible. In exchange for permission to develop a
port, Congress passed legislation in 1966 that established the first 56 acres
of park. Since then it has grown to 15,000 acres.
The clouds break up and drift away near evening, leaving
behind clear, crisp air and a vivid sun setting over the pale, miniature
Chicago skyline. I find myself, for once, among a crowd on a short stretch of beach
in the newest addition to the park. Dunes studded with spiky grass rise
abruptly from the strand. Young poplars stand beyond, where the undulating dunes
resemble those in other parts of the park. There is no clue, except for another
interpretive sign, that this lovely place has been reclaimed from an industrial
landfill.
No clue, that is, until I glance across the Burns Waterway
and see the immense wall of a U.S. Steel plant, which stretches away to a
distant vanishing point. The elaborate and well-used Riverwalk [ED1] has
been erected beside the newly vegetated slope of the reclaimed parkland. Along
its entire length, the implacable wall glares ferociously in the brilliant light
of the setting sun.
One of the central paradoxes of this place is endemic to the
entire national park system. The signs are unavoidable—intentionally so. I’ve
seen them nearly everywhere in the park but they are particularly prevalent
here at the Portage Lakefront beach where their message is reinforced with ropes
and fences. They read either “Keep off Dunes” or “Area Closed” due to “Emergency
Conditions.” The emergency usually is the damage done by the very people for
whom the park exists, the public.
The inadequacy of these warnings is easy to see. Innumerable
footprints brazenly pock the sand behind the signs. The National Park Service
has been charged with a nearly impossible and self-contradictory mission: “The
National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources
and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and
inspiration of this and future generations.”4
Trying to untangle “unimpaired” from “enjoyment” is kind of
like walking in a swamp without expecting to get wet. Balancing preservation of
natural habitats (not to mention wilderness)
with the needs and desires of the visiting public has been a conundrum for at
least a hundred years.5 The issue is particularly stark here at the
Dunes. People come here to enjoy the sand. They want to climb dunes. But sand
is notoriously unstable and the dunes are among the most fragile of ecosystems.
And so the struggle continues, as it must.
The wind has shifted. An onshore breeze kicks up light surf.
The horizon has softened. Someone is swimming about 50 yards from shore. Only
his head is visible above the surface. So small.
The sun sets without fanfare. The opalescent sky dims moment
by moment. Faintly at first, lights become visible. Some of them are stars.
As a national park the Dunes are marvelous, strange,
challenging, and, perfectly suited to this place: full of odd juxtapositions, ironies,
and contradictions You can’t ignore
human impact here. The visibility and odor of nearby industry won’t allow you
to pretend, as you can in some parks, that humans aren’t mixed up in the damage,
restoration, and preservation of what remains.
The writer Wallace Stegner put it this
way, "National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American,
absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst."
I believe it. That’s why I came. Happy birthday, National Park Service.
Here’s to the next 100 years.
To see more images from the Dunes go to my Flickr
album.
Notes:
1. Wallace Stegner quoted in Stegner, Wallace
and Richard W. Etulain, Conversations with Wallace
Stegner on Western History and Literature (University of Utah
Press, 1983).2. St. Croix National Scenic River and Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
3. Explore the Millennium Reserve and Greater Calumet Region: A Natural and Cultural Guide to the Region from Bronzeville to the Indiana Dunes, second edition, p. 13.
4. https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/index.htm
5. Yellowstone, the first national park, was established in 1872.
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