Chapter Eight C: Indiana Dunes

They pulled away from the harbor and turned left on U.S. Highway 12. The highway was proudly signed as West Dunes Highway. In about five miles Pol left the highway and entered the Indiana Dunes State Park. Unlike the National Lakeshore, the park gates were open and they joined a dozen or so cars parked in the visitor lot. The lot looked almost deserted. In the summer hundreds of cars would be jammed into it. But now there was an area of about two rows of parking stalls that had been cleared of snow for winter hikers.

Pol had warned him to bring winter boots and Aaron changed into his Sorrels before setting foot outside the car this time. He pulled a stocking cap out of the pocket of the parka that he wore and tugged it down over his ears, then put on heavy gloves. He could already feel the biting wind attacking from across the lake hurling frozen spray mixed with sand into the air, stinging his cheeks. He looked for Pol and saw that she, too, was dressed for a cold weather outing. She motioned him along with her and they set out across the dunes.

There is a kind of majesty to the sand dunes around Lake Michigan that defies description. The dunes rise away from the Lake in waves as much as fifty and a hundred feet high. And these are the small dunes. The further north east you went along the shore the taller the dunes become until they are mountains of sand. Trees have taken root in the light soil and hold the general shape in place. Thousands of visitors have worn trails into the sand that leave cuts up to three feet deep between the banks.

It was slow going for Aaron. Although the doctor said that the ribs had knit back together fairly well, there was still pain which he knew would disappear only slowly over the next several months. The doctor had scheduled him to start Physical Therapy next week, warning him that if he didn’t stretch and repair the torn cartilage between the ribs he would start to experience limited motion in his right arm. Since Aaron instinctively avoided raising his arm above a certain point or reach out with his right hand, he understood how easy it would be to lose that range of motion permanently. Better to endure the pain now than to face it later, the doctor had said. Aaron had refilled his Vicodin prescription in spite of Jack’s warnings about over-using the drug. He found that he parceled them out for the moments he knew he would be in worst shape, usually late at night when he had stayed up working.

They emerged from the shelter of the trees to stand atop one of taller dunes where they could see far out across the lake. The visibility was impaired by the blowing ice and sand, but to the west Aaron could see the flames rising from the smoke stacks of oil and gas refineries that operated along the lake from Michigan City all the way to East Chicago. It was an eerie sight. Along the shoreline chunks of ice floated on the waves. Suddenly a dark shape took flight from near them on the dune. At first Aaron thought it was a huge bird and instinctively ducked causing a wincing pain in his weary ribs. Then as the shape glided toward the lake that it was a human, hanging from a glider. He and Pol stared agape at the hangglider as he sailed over the beach and out over the frigid water. In a couple minutes he banked steeply and swept back toward shore losing altitude rapidly in the heavy wind. He was about fifty feet from the waves when he landed, running on the beach with the kite pushing him down from behind.

“Now there’s an endangered species,” Aaron chuckled breathing out for what seemed the first time since the glider took off.

“You would think that natural selection would have weeded those out by now,” laughed Pol. Now that their silence had been broken for the first time since leaving the harbor, they felt free to talk together again. “I wanted to bring you out here to explain why I am so passionate about protecting this site,” Pol started. “I was born the year the Army Corps of Engineers identified Burns Ditch as the best site for a new Harbor. The same year a proposal reached the Kennedy administration to turn this entire section of land from Michigan City to Gary into a National Lakeshore to protect it from further development just as they were doing to Kennedy’s home area on Cape Cod. I was raised coming to the Indiana Dunes or Ogden Dunes every spring with my family to swim in Lake Michigan on Memorial Day weekend. My dad was from LaPorte and he loved to come up here two or three times every summer. Occassionally we would change the routine and go north into Michigan to climb Tower Hill, but Dad always said that was too commercial and nothing was as beautiful as our own Indiana Lakeshore.”

“I remember a bit of the controversy,” Aaron said. “I remember debating the issues in… what? fifth grade social studies? It was posed as a classic case of industrialization versus the rising hippie anti-establishment.”

“That’s the way it was presented by both sides, unfortunately,” Pol said, “but there was no reason that both a harbor, at the secondary site in Gary and the Dunes National Lakeshore couldn’t have been successful. But when the question is posed as one of the environment versus the economy, the environment always loses. It’s one of the things I have to work on hardest in the next two years. I have to come at this issue with a positive solution that allows the people we’ve met and that I’ve told you about today to maintain their perceived lifestyle by improving it, and still stops scarring our landscape and environment. You’ve got to help me do that.”

“That’s going to be hard,” Aaron said.

“But,” said Pol, “I’m informed that in addition to being politically savvy and a good writer, you are also a good researcher.” She let that hang in the air and Aaron chose to interpret the comment as Pol having checked his references rather than as having any connection to his work with Jack. Eventually Pol moved on from the subject.

“There is another reason I wanted to bring you out here, though,” Pol said. “I’ve brought all my staff to this site and I’ve given them my lecture on finding the balance between business and environment. So much so that they’ve come to refer to the event as ‘being ditched.’ Please don’t mention that I know about that,” Pol giggled. “It would destroy morale for them to think I know that much about what goes on among my staff. Nina is supposed to be my conduit to the happenings in the office and it wouldn’t help her reputation if they thought she told me everything.”

“Does she?”

“Oh no. She tells me exactly what I should know and prevents me from being side-tracked by what shouldn’t concern me. She is very good at her job as you will find.”

“I’m looking forward to working with her.”

“We’ll see,” Pol quipped enigmatically. “Now, on to my ulterior motive. You already know more about me than any other member of my staff. More of what counts in the long-run. I’m a very good judge of character, Aaron, and I sensed in you an ability to truly empathize with others. It is what has made working in some of the areas you have so difficult. You feel too deeply for the people that you work with. You embody your cause too fully.”

“Is that a problem?” Aaron asked.

“For some it might be,” Pol answered, “but for me it is an asset that I value above all others. I want you to see what I see in this area, these sand dunes of the Midwest. And I couldn’t hope to show you in any other environment.”

“I think I’m beginning to see,” Aaron answered.

“Yes, but not the way I want you to see,” Pol continued. “I brought you to this particular spot because there is a sheltered area just over here where we can sit together.” Pol showed Aaron to a spot just under the trees where a tree had fallen. The log made an excellent seat sheltered from the wind while still looking out over the lake. They sat side by side. “Take off your gloves, Aaron,” Pol suggested as she removed her own. When he had done so she reached for his hands. “Close your eyes and give me your hands. I want to guide you to look into what I see.

Okay, Aaron thought. She was born in the sixties, I was a teen in the sixties. I know how this is done. All we need is a little weed. He let her take his hands in her own. He was surprised that her hands were much warmer than his, but realized that she had been wearing ski mittens. He’d have to look into that. But in the meantime he’d just close his eyes and enjoy holding her hands.

It wasn’t that Aaron was unwilling to be guided in this kind of exercise. He’d done enough of this kind of thing before. He thought about how he really would like to see the things that Pol was describing. He’d like to slip down past the beach in his mind and feel the icy cold waves of the lake as long as he didn’t have to physically touch the water. It wasn’t that difficult to imagine examining the bed of the lake as he worked his way along the shore; even to sink beneath the seaweed (no kudzu here) and into crust of the earth. Pol described the various layers in such exact detail that he could actually imagine what each looked like, right down to the sand and limestone bedrock that supported the weight of all that water. She thought it was a living thing, so even though he was much more interested in the living hands that were held in his, as she described its pulse, he could imagine the earth itself pulsing beneath the bedrock surface. As she guided him into the harbor channel he could still hear the whine of the dredging engines. The depth of 27 feet that was negotiated in the sixties when the Army Corps wanted to create the channel out into Lake Michigan at a dept of 36 feet was a compromise that had no real effect on the shipping that drove business in the harbor during the spring summer and fall months. But the Corps had argued that a deeper channel pushed out into the lake nearly a mile would increase the general water movement just enough that the channel would not freeze over solid in the winter months. But, there was no real reason to keep it open in winter as no ships wintered in this harbor when they could be plying the seas by leaving the St. Lawrence before it froze. Port of Indiana was typically empty nearly a month before the Seaway closed for the winter as Captains of sea-going vessels made for the Atlantic.

But what Pol was showing him now (Okay, saying. He was paying attention to her voice, not just holding her hands.) was that the bedrock was actually very near the depth of the channel here. Digging it deeper would require gouging into the bedrock itself which was probably the reason the Corps decided not to go deeper. But the dredgers had scraped off all the silt and soil down to the rock bed. As the machinery whined, Aaron could almost feel the scraping pain of steel against the rockbed, grinding it away a little at a time. But it didn’t seem to be adequate to cause so much concern, or so much pain in the surface of the earth.

Then he saw the soft spot. (Okay, imagined he saw it as Pol described it. He reminded himself that the only thing real about this was the feel of her hands in his, which were still remarkably warm.) Then he was plunging down through the soft spot being dragged on the water’s relentless path into the crust of the earth, seeping between layers of bedrock far out from shore and then down again to where the earth’s plates ground against each other. This wasn’t right, he thought. There are no faults in this part of the country. He knew enough basic earth science to know that. The very idea that water was building up in a cavity between two crust plates was so absurd that he wanted to scream out that she was wrong. But it wasn’t his scream. It was the earth screaming in pain as an old wound was repeatedly re-opened by the relentless scraping of the dredgers. He looked at the debris that littered the lake bottom and shore as he returned toward the sand dunes. Sunken boats, dead fish, drums of toxic looking substances seeping into the water. The entire picture was nightmarish now that he knew that the earth was suffering beneath the surface of Lake Michigan. That to build the harbor they had scraped the scab off an old wound that the earth was trying to heal and was becoming angrier and angrier about enduring. With his new-found imagination, it was all too easy to imagine that the catastrophe of a mid-Lake Michigan earthquake would cause. Chicago, just forty-five minutes from the harbor, and one of North America’s most densely populated centers, would be destroyed. Loss of life could be measured in the millions. The economic disaster would cripple the nation and drive the world’s major economies into a new dark ages. Aaron was frankly surprised that Pol had gone into politics instead of script-writing for the movies. This would make a doozy of a disaster film.

Finally, he had to just turn off the projection and open his eyes. The world snapped back into focus as did the acute sensation of Pol’s hands held in his. She still had her eyes closed, as though she were still guiding him through the earth’s crust. She was really quite lovely. She’d been his guardian angel the night of the accident, getting him help, visiting him, taking care of his insurance. But for all her strengths, she was showing her vulnerabilities to him now. It was the exact weakness/strength that she told him he possessed: embodying the cause to such an extent that she hurt whenever it was hurt. It was that unexpected vulnerability that he saw painted on her face and her gently smiling lips. He suddenly wanted to fall onto those lips with passion and regained control of himself by trying to remove his hands from hers. Her eyes snapped open, but she did not relinquish her grip. Instead she smiled, leaned forward as she pulled him toward her and kissed him.

It was not the ravishing passion that he had moments ago fantasized, but rather a gentle, lingering brush of the lips that made his heart skip a beat.

“I knew you would be able to see,” she said. “I’ve waited so long for someone I could share this with.” She brushed his lips again then stood, helping him to his feet. Finally she released one of his hands so they could walk beside each other as she kept firm hold of his other hand.

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