One of the things I've been working on this summer was writing a recently released report for the National Parks Conservation Association on the future of the Indiana Dunes National lakeshore. I'm just the wordsmith, not the policymaker, but I do have a close and longtime interest in this national park just an hour from Chicago. I knew it before it was a national park: My mom, Lee Botts, was one of the activists in the Save the Dunes Council who pushed for the park until it was finally established in 1966. She wasn't the kind of mom who left the kids sitting in front of the TV.
My parents discovered the Dunes shortly after they came to Chicago from Oklahoma as newlyweds in 1949. I have many memories of the Dunes and the campaign to save them and shape a new national park around Northern Indiana's steel mills and other development.
Assigned to sit at a card table at the Hyde Park Shopping Center Saturday mornings, at the age of 8 or 9, collecting signatures from shoppers on a petition to urge the passage of federal legislation to establish the park (passed in 1966). Riding in a DUKW (the WWII-era amphibious vehicle) in which my mom was touring around a bunch of congressmen, with sand blowing through my hair.
Staying in a friend's creaky cabin on stilts right on the beach at Porter Beach, with a potbellied stove and sand blowing against the rattling windows, part of an artists' colony that had been a retreat for Chicagoans since early in the century. Long gone now. One of many cabins and old tourist inns and campgrounds where we spent a week or a month in the Dunes in the summers of my childhood, my brothers and I free to roam through woods and swamps and dunes, bitten by bugs and encountering snakes, turtles, herons, raccoons.
Singing around the campfire in 1969 at the farewell celebration picnic at the patch of precious woods and marsh owned by our dear friend, artist John Hawkinson, the last holdout who had fought hard to keep it and the best remaining part of the Dunes from being bulldozed for what is now an Arcelor Mittal steel mill.
Carrying a picket sign at the dedication of the Port of Indiana in 1970, one of a handful of women and children from whom the Indiana National Guard had lined up troops in force to protect the guest speaker, Julie Nixon Eisenhower. She gave a speech all about jobs. We were mourning the precious dunes and woods that had been lost forever to build that port.
Long days spent lazing on the beach, and many hikes through Cowles and Pinhook Bogs, the Inland Marsh, Miller Woods, and all the other marvels away from the beach that are now in the park. Illicit winter toboganning outings down dunes in the snow. Sweeps of trillium and lupine in springtime.
The two summer homes we enjoyed for a few years each, leasebacks, which owners had sold to the National Park Service for the park but were allowed to use for up to 25 years before they were torn down. One was an oddly constructed hovel of pink-painted concrete blocks in the middle of the woods near a trickling creek, hand-built by a guy who sold us the lease, and who proudly told us he had cut down 200 trees to make space for a three-hole miniature golf course in a lawn in the middle of the forest. We would rather have had the trees, and we gradually let the woods have the lawn back.
A later leaseback had been the home and clinic of a quack doctor in the 1920s, who had fled to the Dunes, when it was still regarded as something of a wilderness, after losing his medical license in Chicago. He had a large organic vegetable garden on top of a dune (that's not what he was a quack about) and what my mom called her million-dollar view, over a small wetland and the first dune ridge to the broad expanse of Lake Michigan where the sun set behind the distant skyline of Chicago. We enjoyed that view and the nearby beach for a dozen years until the lease was up.
Both those houses are gone, torn down to let the sites return to nature. My brothers and I have hiked back to find scarcely any evidence there ever were buildings there. That's good. The whole point of all my mom's efforts, and those of all our friends who fought to save the Dunes, was to salvage as much as possible of the unique landscape, even where the land had already been developed, for the public and the future.
The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore has its troubles: budget cuts, transportation issues, invasive species, arguments over how it should be managed. One of the big problems is that though Chicagoans and Illinois Sen. Paul Douglas fought hard to establish the park, Chicagoans nowadays don't have much sense of connection with it. Many people in the Chicago area today don't know there is a national park an hour away, or lump it together with Indiana Dunes State Park.
But the park also is a triumph and a wonder. It didn't all get bulldozed for steel mills and industrial ports. There's far more support for it today, even within industry in Northwest Indiana. There's a lot more support for conservation in general in the region today. I'm hopeful for the future of the park.
Lynn McClure, Midwest director of the NPCA, will be talking about the report and the park with me Sunday when I guest-host the Mike Nowak Show (all about gardening and environmental issues in Chicago) from 9 to 11 a.m. on WCPT-AM 820 and FM 92.7 (north), 92.5 9 (west), & 99.9FM (south). It's also streamed online. Other guests will be talking about the Garfield Park Conservatory, Open House Chicago, and fall and winter vegetable gardening. Give it a listen.
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.
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