Indiana Dunes

Lia laughed at me for packing swim shorts. “It’s a lake,” she said, in the flat voice she uses when she thinks I’ve misread a map. Then we crested the top of Mount Baldy and there was no far shore, just water going blue-grey to the horizon with a freighter dissolving into the haze, and she stopped talking. We had come to Indiana expecting an afterthought squeezed between Chicago and the steel mills, and instead we spent three days barefoot, sand in everything we owned, arguing pleasantly about which beach was best. I still don’t have an answer.

The living dunes

The dunes here move. Mount Baldy, the tallest, walks itself inland a few feet every year, swallowing the oak forest at its back so that dead grey trunks poke out of the sand like the masts of buried ships. We walked up it in the early morning while the surface was still cool, and I understood why they call this sand “singing” — under a certain step it squeaks, a thin dry note that Lia insisted was me and my shoes until she heard it under her own bare feet.

Between the mills and the marsh

What I love about this place is that it refuses to be pretty in a simple way. Stand on Portage Beach and you can turn your head from clean lake water to the tangled silver geometry of a working steel mill, smoke and all. It should be ugly. It isn’t. Behind the dunes, the Great Marsh runs cool and green, and we spent an afternoon on the Cowles Bog trail moving from open dune to black-water bog to sudden beach, more ecosystems in three miles than I’d seen in whole countries. A birder lent Lia his binoculars to find a scarlet tanager. She still talks about it.

Slow afternoons on the water

By the third day we had given up on ambition. We bought sandwiches in Chesterton, drove to Kemil Beach where the crowd thins, and did nothing. Lia read; I waded in to my knees in water that was, she was right, a lake — freshwater cold, no salt sting, gulls instead of terns. But there were waves, real ones, rolling in with a proper hush and drag, and when the sun went low the whole beach turned the color of a peach. We watched the lights of Chicago prick up far across the water like a second, distant shore.

Getting There

Indiana Dunes sits about an hour east of Chicago along Lake Michigan’s southern rim, easily reached by car via I-94 or the Indiana Toll Road. The South Shore Line commuter train runs from downtown Chicago to stations at Dune Park and Beverly Shores, so you can arrive without a car and walk to the sand. The national park and the state park sit side by side; a state-park vehicle fee applies to the latter. Come on a weekday if you can — summer weekends fill the beach lots by mid-morning — and bring layers, because the lake makes its own weather.