Some say that of all the magical locations
in the Indiana Dunes, the most marvelous are the "blowouts."
In these amphitheater-shaped arenas, the wind has carved
away the dunes, exposing solemn stands of long-dead trees,
dramatic records of what nature has wrought and will do
again. What happened once upon a time and will continue
to occur on the grounds of these tree cemeteries is akin
to the rise and fall of empires.
One such massive blowout, rich with
subtle beauty, lies set back from Lake Michigan at the
far east end of the Indiana Dunes State Park, distinctly
away from the crowds. Attend here with due reverence the
continuous memorial of past performance and building orchestration
of natural forces. Let your mind and heart applaud this
blowout — its rushing, whirling winds that impatiently
await a more dramatic script.
This spot is not a personal discovery.
Rather, I was sent here by J. Ronald and Joan Engel, two
nearby residents who are eloquent writers and dedicated
Dunes' environmentalists. Of all the choice hidden places
in the region, this is the site they jointly selected
for me to experience the unique beauty of the Dunes area.
I found it by walking along the beach and looking for
a clump of four cottonwoods on the foredune, the sand
ridge that separates the lake and the dunes.
The pleasant walk along the beach
did not leave the bustling world behind entirely. The
flotsam left by disrespectful lake users cluttered the
beach even along this rather isolated stretch. In the
distant west, furthermore, loomed the Bethlehem Steel
plant. To the east stood Michigan City's power plant.
Trudging to the top of the foredune,
however, I put all this away and took in the full view
of the blowout, the scene of one of nature's most artful
pageants. The performance built slowly as I picked up
subtle messages from the landscape. Blades of marram grass,
scattered across the back of the beach and all of the
foredune, offered the first act of the drama. A foot or
more tall, these clumps dug desperately into the soil
and stood against the wind, evoking the struggle for the
beginning of life itself.
Here, they are the beginning of life.
The success of these wispy blades of grass is crucial
to a subsequent series of plants — from bluestem
grass, puccoon flowers, and milkweed plants to oak and
hickory trees — that will one day be able to grow
in soil created by these pioneering grasses.
Possibly no other place in the world
demonstrates the basic theory of vegetative development
known in botany as plant succession better than such a
blowout. After all, it was here at the Indiana Dunes in
1899 that University of Chicago biology professor Henry
C. Cowles formulated the concept. According to Ron Engel,
the work of Cowles and other U of C professors such as
Victor Shelford and W. C. Allee earned the Indiana Dunes
the nickname "birthplace of ecology."
As I walked into this blowout, I passed
one species of plant life after another. But the several
prickly pear cactus plants I noticed underfoot astounded
me. Nesting unpretentiously under the bluestem grasses,
these plants were as distinctly and obviously cacti as
are the varieties that grow throughout the deserts of
the Southwest and Mexico. Yet, they are prospering only
two hundred yards from Lake Michigan in sand that is buried
by snow in the winter and peppered by rainstorms throughout
the rest of the year.
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The puccoon plant finds hospitable
ground in which to grow, thanks to marram grass that
first held the line in the windy dune landscape.
Photo by Carol Freeman.
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My short journey into the blowout
— just two to three times the length of a football
field — reached a dramatic climax as I neared a rustling,
20-foot oak and several cottonwoods three times that tall.
Scattered on the ground in the shadow of the cottonwoods
lay the trunks of decaying trees, long-dead. Like slain
soldiers after a battle, these once held the front lines
in the epic saga that occurred here. They helped create
these dunes and surrendered their lives in the process.
These cottonwoods, when alive and
growing, could seize and hold the earth. Their fallen
leaves helped fertilize the soil for other plant life
while their roots held the land fast against the wind.
Around the cottonwoods, a dune began to form and grew
broader and taller. The piling sand, however, started
to bury the trees, killing them before it reached their
tops. With the dead trees no longer holding the dune,
the insistent wind inevitably had its way, gouging a blowout
through the sand and wiping the slate clean for a new
generation of pioneer plants.
Just to the west, in an early-stage
blowout, someone had taken a dead tree trunk, affixed
it to a standing one and created a huge cross. A blowout,
however, needs no such symbols — it speaks in plain
detail of continuing life cycles.
This blowout is an arena, a place
to be a spectator. Its dune walls stand higher than I
expected, its length greater, and its view of Lake Michigan
more dramatic. I climbed an adjacent dune to look down
on the spectacle, to comprehend the whole. Hickory, oak,
and cottonwood trees shared the overlook with me. I could
picture Professor Cowles one hundred years ago sitting
on this slope to study the change in the plants almost
foot by foot into the blowout. He would have witnessed
the same slow performance I was now watching: patches
of marram grass, bluestem, cacti and puccoon flowers,
as well as new cottonwood trees and baby oaks, all preparing
the land for a return engagement between dune sand and
relentless wind.
Kenan Heise, author of Chicago
The Beautiful: A City Reborn (Bonus Books, 2001),
is a retired reporter for the Chicago Tribune, an author,
poet, and playwright. His avocation is learning to appreciate
and enjoy nature throughout Chicago Wilderness.
