DUNED IN INDIANA--Trip 2

A thunderstorm last night cleaned the air for another brilliant autumn day. "It's late October and suburban Chicago hasn't had a hard frost yet," said Andy, as we loaded the car in Mount Prospect. Mom watched from her front porch.
Six days with family in Illinois had given us time to winterize Mom's house... storing the garden stakes and fencing, cleaning the gutters, trimming the trees, packing up the lawn furniture, raking the leaves, setting up a compost pile. It was a busy six days.

Then suddenly it was time to leave.

"Where did six days go?" asked Andy, as we climbed in Little Red and drove toward the Tri-State.

At West Beach of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, we followed the Succession Trail up and down the wooden stairs, along the plank boardwalk and over the dunes. "A lot of the leaves are off here," said Andy, "but the sumac is still beautiful." Oaks along the dunes rustled dry and brown, but the maples still retained some yellow and green.
Inland Marsh Trail, a mile walk through oak savannah into shallow lowlands, showed us plant succession as clusters of oak trees gave way to shrubs and grasses. The boardwalk skirted blowouts, climbed 250 stairs to forested dunes and offered a spectacular view of the Chicago skyline far in the distance.

Another mile-long trail took us to the old Bailly Homestead, an 1820's fur trading post, and the Chellberg Farm, a 1900's Swedish farmstead.
The Bailly Homestead, settled by the family of Joseph Bailly in the 1820's, enabled Joseph Bailly to operate a modest fur trading business with the Pottawatomie Indians. They brought him beaver pelts in exchange for blankets, knives, metal hatchets, fabric and clothing. He shipped the pelts to Mackinac, and from there they traveled to Montreal and eventually Europe for a fashion industry that was intent on producing beaver felt hats.
Bailly chose the trading post site in 1822 because of its location on the Little Calumet River. Pottawatomies, gathering and trapping, spent their summers here in dome-shaped wigwams built of bent tree saplings and cattail mats. In the winter they separated into small family groups and moved south into the Kankakee Marsh. We read that women collected hazel nuts, hickory nuts and black walnuts. All these lined the clearing of the Bailly Homestead.
A woodpecker pounded on the front of the Bailly house. "Get out of there!" yelled Andy, running toward the bird and waving his arms. The woodpecker flew off, only to land on one of the log fur trader buildings. He left a baseball size hole in the front carrying post of the Bailly house. "It just shows that those little pilliated woodpeckers are not discriminating when it comes to color," said Andy. The light tan trim didn't look like wood at all. We read the sign. Joseph Bailly never had a chance to live in the house. He died before it was finished in 1835.

Chellberg Farm, .3 miles farther, had been farmed until a few years ago when the volunteer who operated it for the National Park Service passed away. Now the house and barn were locked up tight.
In the distance we could hear reminders of today: the rumble of the steel mills some miles up the lakeshore, the tooting of a train whistle, and then repeated crashes as the engine picked up additional cars and finally the chugging growl as it moved on. But at Chellberg Farm, the year was 1900.
We pulled into Kemil Beach Access Road--no parking any time--right on the tip of Lake Michigan. "It looks just like an ocean," said Andy, "with the waves coming in and the sea grass bending in the wind. And you can't see a bit of land anywhere." We followed the narrow two-lane Lake Front Drive, water on one side, homes perched above us on sand dunes on the other.
Lake View, a small park on the water at Beverly Shores, offered shelters and picnic facilities with beach access. We walked on the sand along the waterfront... a power plant far in the distance on the Michigan side, steel mills dotting the horizon on the Indiana end, and out over the water, maybe 30 miles distant, the Chicago skyline with its Willis Tower pointing a shadowy finger at the heavens. A gull dared us to come closer, bobbing its head to the steady slosh of the incoming waves.
Dune Ridge Trail climbed to the top of an interior sand dune ridge for views of the oak savannahs and lakeshore dips. Cattails swayed in the marsh below as the 4:00 p.m. sun glimmered off pools of water in the low-lying bogs.
The newest trail, Great Marsh Trail, cut through an old thousand-acre marsh about a foot above the water level. We spooked some mallards that took off in hurried flight.
Far in the distance a train whistled repeatedly; then the steady rumble of steel on steel broke the stillness.

"Did you read the sign at the Joseph Bailly house that explained why this area was slow to be settled?" asked Andy. "It said there was a hundred thousand-acre swamp. I'll bet this is a remnant of it."

Cattail puff blew around us and clung to the sides of the tall green stalks. Most of the dark brown cigars had gone to seed. "I'd take some to start fires in the winter if they weren't so far gone," I told Andy. But they looked beautiful in the wild.
Our last stop, Mount Baldy, towered over the surrounding landscape, a 126-foot tall shifting monster of a sand dune. Looking serene and calm after last night's rain with the 5:00 o'clock p.m. sun casting long shadows, Mount Baldy is anything but placid. It is the tallest moving sand dune in the national lakeshore. Without vegetation, it continues its deliberate march inland, burying mature trees in its path on the south slope.
We climbed to the bald knoll and breathed in the cooling air of sunset from the top of one of the only national park areas to have "inspiration" as part of its stated mission.