Twenty years ago, a tiny band of cantankerous nature-lovers arm-wrestled the powers that be into creating a one-of-a-kind National Park on Chicago`s doorstep.
”When I was a Boy Scout in the `30s, we`d come out from the city to camp right over there,” said David Sander–one of ”that damn bunch of bird watchers,” as their mover-and-shaker opponents used to call them. He was pointing toward the gray corduroy metal walls of a steel mill about a mile away. ”Back then, for as far as you could see, everything around here was wilderness.”
Sander, editor of Dunes Country Magazine, and his companions paused on a forested ridge for a moment to get their topographical bearings. The group was marking the 20th anniversary of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore by retracing a series of hikes through which the most persistant nature freak of them all, Sen. Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, had publicized their fight to preserve the unique landscape of Lake Michigan`s southern coastline.
”The senator had a favorite way of explaining why he stuck it out for the 10 years it took to get his park legislation through Congress,” recalled Herb Reed, who had guided Douglas on many of those long-ago VIP outings.
”`When I was a young man I wanted to save the world,` Douglas would say.
`Now I only want to save the dunes.` When Douglas was 50, he enlisted in World War II as a Marine infantryman. So when he got into our fight, we knew that he`d signed up for the duration.”
Depending on how you look at it, the Illinois senator either did, or did not, achieve his late-life ambition.
Pointed in the direction of the industrial plants that now occupy his boyhood campgrounds, Sander and his companions stood face to face with incontrovertible evidence of man`s capacity to obliterate his environmental heritage. The landfill those mills partly stand on, and the artifical harbor that was dredged to serve them, mark an abrupt, rectilinear exception to the sandy beaches that, on either flank, trace gentle curves off to the horizon. Each of those factories is topped with a crown of smokestacks that streak the blue-sky canopy above them with towering, zebra-like stripes of smoke and steam.
Sander and his friends turned on their heels, and their field of vision instantaneously reverted to a landscape that Mother Nature shaped thousands of years before human beings ever set foot on these shores–let alone had the power to change her handiwork.
On the highest dunes, the stands of maples and pines are so thick that the filtered sunlight coming through their boughs makes all those who pass beneath them appear to be clothed in mottled, camouflage gear. As they paused under that leafy umbrella, Sander and his fellow hikers looked like partisans about to launch a guerrilla attack in support of their long-running Save The Dunes campaign.
Below them, each of the successive dune ridges that parallel the lakeshore gets smaller and smaller, and their vegetation cover progressively thins out. Trees give way to bushes and shrubs and those, in turn, to grasses and intermittent clumps of weeds, until finally the sand holds an unchalleged monopoly on the terrain. Below the last bluff, the unblemished beach takes magic-slate inventory of every creature that crosses it.
From their tree-shaded lookout, Sander`s company descended to the water`s edge and, while hiking along the deserted beach, passed two sets of animal tracks. David Reed, Herb`s college-age son, read them with the certainty of an FBI agent interpreting a suspect`s finger prints. By their crisp outline, one set of hoof prints indicated that a deer had recently come down to the shore to drink.
The larger, cup-shaped tracks had to have been left by an animal sometime before the last storm, about a week or so before, David Reed explained. Their size meant that falling rain water had enlarged them and–in an abbreviated version of the centuries-long process by which the dunes themselves had been formed–eroded the original imprints of the deer`s hoofs, smoothing them into concave, bowl-like scoops. A few more rains and that animal`s tracks would be completely erased, leaving the sand ready again to record the future comings and goings of the dune country`s inhabitants.
Directly across the lake, Chicago`s skyline was just barely visible.
”That`s why I can`t even imagine living anywhere else,” said Herb Reed, who for more than two decades has commuted into his Loop office from a home just inside the National Lakeshore`s boundary. ”In the city, everyone is so packed in on top of each other that you feel lost in the crowd. But out here, only 50 minutes from Chicago, there are still places like this where every living thing gets to leave its mark–even if it`s only for a little while.”
From Gary to Michigan City, Indiana`s shoreline is an industrial-and-bucoli c patchwork quilt. At its western boundary, the National Lakeshore abuts U.S. Steel`s Gary Works, where, in 1906, the dunes were leveled in favor of a mill that has since turned out more tonnage than any other steel-making facilty in the world. Just across the park`s eastern boundary, the Northern Indiana Public Service Co.`s electric-generating plant is perennially topped by a cloud of steam–as if it were some kind of ironic, swords-into-ploughshares advertisement for atomic energy`s peacetime uses.
As an automobile whizzes down U.S. Hwy. 12, which twists and turns in and out of the park`s jigsaw-puzzle boundaries, its windshield alternately frames scenes painted in the various greens of a biological palette and those dominated by the rust-brown hues of scrap piles and industrial storage yards. Indeed, that rapid-fire succession is so regular that a first-time visitor might think two equal-and-opposite principles of natural selection must have fought each other to a draw here.
According to David Sander, that guess could pretty much serve as a capsule history of the region. Something about the stark beauty of the Indiana shoreline has always either inspired men with undying devotion or given them a compulsion to destroy Mother Nature`s sandy creations.
”Back in the 1890s, a young University of Chicago student by the name of Henry Cowles was wrestling with a scientific problem as he rode through this countryside on a train,” Sander recalled, by way of illustrating one side of the dunes` love/hate dichotomy. Cowles` scholarly elders had already realized that the relationship between the various life forms of a given habitat cannot be haphazard, Sander explained. But exactly how they were interrelated remained a puzzle.
Looking out the railroad car`s windows, Cowles had a gut-reaction inspiration that somewhere along these beaches he would find the answer to that problem. Begging the conductor to make an unscheduled stop, he started straightaway to survey the dune country`s plant life, a study that was to preoccupy him for the rest of his career. In the process, Cowles single-handedly created the science of ecology.
”After time and time again making that same descent from the high dunes down to the beach that we just did, it finally dawned on Cowles that this shoreline is a sloping summary of biological history,” Sander said.
When a dune first forms, he explained, the earliest plants to establish themselves are hardy weeds flexible enough to survive by sending out new shoots and stems every time the blowing sand exposes their roots or threatens to bury them. Sander was pointing back towards the knee-high Marram grass that had whipped around his fellow hikers` legs as they crossed the last dune ridge before reaching the beach.
When each of those pioneering plants dies off, its decaying matter contributes to a thin layer of humus that, season after season, builds up on top of the sand, and in it more complex life forms slowly begin to take hold. In turn, the roots of those bushes and shrubs stabilize the dune, and as the soil level grows thicker and thicker, it is host to increasingly larger plants, until the oldest ridges are finally covered with the kind of forest in which the day`s outing had begun.
Cowles discovery of this process of ”plant succession” made the Indiana dunes a pilgrimage site for biologists from the four corners of the Earth. Around World War I, it was proposed to preserve Cowles` living laboratory for future generations of naturalists, professional and amateur alike, by turning the whole shoreline from Michigan City to Gary into a National Park.
”Those dunes are to the Midwest what the Grand Canyon is to Arizona and the Yosemite to California,” said Carl Sandburg, who made his home nearby while working on his Lincoln biography. ”They constitute a signature of time and eternity; once lost, the loss would be irrevocable.”
Others, though, were more impressed by the dune land`s short-range potential. Long before Cowles inventoried them, the sand hills near Michigan City had been stripped of their trees, which were shipped across the lake as lumber for Chicago`s builders.
In the 1920s, Sam Insull bought the South Shore Railroad, which connects the Indiana lakefront with Chicago, and made big plans to develop the area as a water-sport riviera. Although the Depression killed that project, the traction magnate left as his legacy the string of tiny, beach-front communities that dot the dunes country.
Then in 1959, the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway seemed to offer Northwest Indiana access to a new, global market, and the area underwent another round of industrial expansion. Bethlehem Steel Co. started buying up the best sections of undeveloped shoreline. Other companies followed suit, and for a while the remaining dunes seemed headed for the same fate as those that had been replaced by Gary`s mills.
”The steel companies knew we were organizing to put up a fight for the dunes,” said Herb Reed. ”So their tactic was to move quick and get a plant up and running before we could find someone to hold congressional hearings on the issue.”
Nor did the mill owners feel constrained to debate according to Roberts Rules. One key parcel of land was owned by Dr. Virginia Reuterskiold and her invalid husband, Dr. Knute Reuterskiold. In fact, their ten acres of duneland were so central to Bethlehem`s blueprints, that the company finally offered the Reuterskiolds $100,000 (more than $250,000 in present-day dollars) if they would only move out of their 70-year-old house. Still, the elderly physicians refused to put a price tag on their love of the landscape.
”Their place was right over there,” said Herb Reed, motioning towards the mill, which was now only a couple of hundred yards beyond the advancing party of hikers. ”When the Reuterskiolds wouldn`t bite, the company simply bought up all the parcels around them and started leveling the dunes. Day and night, they ran their bulldozers round and round the Reuterskiolds` home, and shined floodlights on their windows, until they nearly drove those old folks mad.”
In the end, the Reuterskiolds did move, but only after the publicity that their case generated got the Save The Dunes Council`s cause adopted by the then brand-new environmental movement. By then as well, the leader of the crusade, Dorothy Buell, had enlisted the aid of Senator Douglas.
”I had seen the lakefront from 95th Street in Chicago to the outskirts of Gary swallowed up by ugliness and a pall of smoke. I thought there should be some place for beauty, and that night I took an oath to do what I could for the dunes,” Douglas once said, by way of explaining what prompted him to respond to Buell`s call.
”They sure made an odd couple,” recalled Herb Reed. ”At first, the only thing they had in common was old age: Dorothy, a housewife, was well up in her 60s when she called the first meeting of what became our Save The Dunes Council. Beyond that, though, the senator was a New Deal liberal and Dorothy was a Republican–hell, she was to the right of the John Birch Society!”
That was not the only awkward position Douglas found himself in, added David Sander. Douglas was also an Illinois politician stepping into the middle of a neighboring state`s intramural squabbles. So as his first order of business, he asked Indiana`s Sen. Homer Capehart to co-sponsor a bill to make the shoreline a National Park. ”First I`ll have to check it out with the boys in Indianapolis,” Capehart replied. Later he came back to tell Douglas that it was no deal. The boys in Indianapolis–the state capital`s wheelers and dealers–had decided that a mill, not a park, was going through.
The ”boys,” though, did not realize how resourceful a bunch of bird watchers could be. To make a new mill practical, the steel companies needed the federal government to dredge a harbor, and Herb Reed had the inspiration of asking the Reuterskiolds to re-invest their windfall profits in a good cause.
”On the q.t., we bought a little piece of shoreline right where we figured that harbor had to go in,” said Reed, whose engineering training stood by him as he made that informed guess. ”It was only a few acres, but once we got our hands on it, there was no way they could have their mill if we didn`t sell–and we were not about to, unless we got a National Park out of the deal.”
Reed`s gambit allowed Douglas to campaign for a compromise under which
–10 years and hundreds of bills after he first took up the dunes` cause
–Congress voted for a port and industrial park with a National Park wrapped around them. ”`No Democrat is worth a tinker`s damn,` Dorothy Buell used to say, `Except Sen. Douglas–and he`s worth everything!”` David Sander recalled, as his party came to a halt in front of the fence that marks the dividing line between the two beneficiaries of that 1966 compromise.
Over the 20 years since, noted Herb Reed, the relative strengths of the bird watchers and the captains of industry have changed considerably. Currently, the district`s representative, Congressman Peter Visclosky, is sponsoring a bill to enlarge the National Lakeshore`s boundaries–hearings on which begin Tuesday with Herb Reed testifying–while the steel companies are now looking for buyers for their surplus property. Hard pressed by foreign competition–the St. Lawrence Seaway having proven a two-way avenue of commerce–the mill owners long since have abandoned their expansive vision of two decades ago. To erase the red ink on their ledger books, they desperately need to convert land into cash.
”Look at the irony of how things work out,” said Herb Reed, looking first up to the mill, then over to the shoreline. He pointed to a tiny sand bar, its top barely showing above the water line, that ran out from the beach for a few yards. ”See it–that`s a dune.”
That mini-dune, he explained, had already been thousands of years in the making. It took all that time for the currents and wind to move that little bit of sand down from its original home somewhere on Lake Michigan`s northern shores. A few thousand years from now, that sand will have built up and moved inland–just like those ridges his party climbed had done long before. The first sprigs of Marran grass will appear on it, and inaugurate the same process of plant succession that Henry Cowles recorded in his notebooks almost a hundred years ago. Centuries from now, if no sinister force intrudes, students will still be able to check their textbooks` account of the axioms of ecology by exploring the same landscape that Cowles knew.
”And what does that ugly beast represent?” Herb Reed asked, gesturing towards the steel mill that is still a blot on his personal horizon. ”Twenty years of boom times–and now they`re over and done with forever.”
