My night in Griffith did not go as planned. Just as I finally found myself drifting off to sleep, I was awoken by police car headlights shining directly into my car. As I watched from behind my sheer curtains, a man in a t-shirt and jeans came over to my car and called out, “You sleeping in there?” I explained that I was indeed planning to spend the night, as long as that was okay. With a grandfatherly respect and clear desire to help, the man told me that he was trying to think if there might be a better place for me to sleep. I told him I was open to any suggestions; the park had seemed quiet and out of the way but I was flexible. The problem, I was told, was that the park was technically closed. The man said he was actually with the fire department, but that he would call the police department to give them a heads up that I was there. If the police had any issue with that, they would stop by to talk to me. I thanked the man, he left, and I crawled into the back to try to sleep again.
Not five minutes later, the same man pulled back in in what I had previously thought was a police car but actually belonged to a local program through which public safety volunteers worked with the town’s police and fire departments. Knocking on my window, the man told me it would be better if I left the park but that there was a fire station a block away with a side driveway no one ever used. I could spend the night nestled up against the side of the station. The fire fighters on the night shift already knew to expect me. Surprised that the man had actually found me a better place to sleep rather than just telling me to get lost, I fired up the engine to head across the way to the fire station.
As soon as my head hit the pillow in the new sleeping spot, however, a jeep carrying four fire fighters pulled up next to me. The driver was less friendly than the helpful volunteer had been. He demanded to know what I thought I was doing there, who had told me I could sleep there, where I was headed tomorrow, what time I would be leaving in the morning. He interrogated me gruffly, occasionally letting me know angrily that he couldn't see me very well or couldn’t hear me properly. But at the end of the interrogation, he told me with a tone of profound respect and commitment, “You're all set then, man. Welcome. We’ll take care of you.”
In the morning, I headed north to Indiana Dunes National Park. The early morning traffic was a dense flow of trucks and my SUV slipped in among the towering giants. Two prefabricated houses drifted by. A shipment of Canadian lumber had been pulled over and the flashing state police lights were causing every driver on the road to tap their brakes. A roadside warehouse had a banner up claiming to be the largest fireworks store in the world. I exited the highway and zigzagged my way to the park and to the Cowles Bog trailhead parking lot.
I was the third car into the lot that morning, but as I prepared my backpack for a day of hiking, more and more cars arrived. I snapped a photo of the trail map bulletin board thinking it might come in handy and hastily headed onto the trail to try to beat the rest of the visitors still spilling out of their vehicles. I walked along a pleasant forest trail alongside a marsh, listening to bullfrogs strumming guttural, broken chords out of time. I made it 15 minutes in before the trail unexpectedly emptied out onto a public road. Pulling up the photo of the map I had taken but never actually looked at, I realized I had been going in the wrong direction. I had to retrace my steps back to the car, battling mosquitoes the entire way. The trail I wanted didn’t start from the parking lot, but actually required a short jaunt back down the driveway I had driven in on and cross the main road. Finally on the right path, I continued through the forest, past the bog the trailhead had taken its name from, up a grassy dune, and found myself on the shore of Lake Michigan.
Smokestacks rise above Indiana Dunes National Park
I had expected grand views, maybe a glimpse of the Chicago skyline, and a soft sand beach to have a picnic on. Instead, I was immediately greeted by a rotting dinghy pulled up on dismal gray sand. A quarter mile to my left was a massive power plant, its towering smoke stacks belching out putrid clouds. To the right, a few miles down the beach, cooling towers of another power plant were visible. A heavy industrial hum blotted out the sounds of the waves. Train horns groaned somewhere out of sight. I tried to imagine what the lakeshore would have been like back when the dunes still outnumbered the power plants. A stunning monarch butterfly danced above the sand. I followed it for a moment before it veered off and lost itself among the dune grass. It didn’t want to stay on that beach, either.
After I returned to my car, a 15-minute drive brought me to the head of the Miller Trail in a different, discontiguous part of the park. Posted on the trailhead bulletin board was a warning about an assault and robbery that had occurred on the trail just two days prior. “Always hike in groups of two or more.”
The start of the trail took me alongside an interdunal pond. The sides of the trail were muddy and, with every step, I heard frogs splashing deeper into the puddles to escape whatever imminent threat they felt I posed. I crossed an overengineered boardwalk-bridge hybrid that led to the other side of the pond. From the bridge, I caught a glimpse of a turtle just below the surface. Perhaps startled by my footsteps amplified by vibrations in the metal bridge, the turtle abruptly dove into the depths of the pond and out of sight. On the far side, I hiked up through a stand of black oak and among a series of ponds that seemed to increase in size from the first to the last. Electric green lizards scampered out of my way, their flailing rubber arms churning up tiny puffs of sand. Vibrantly colored dragonflies danced in the think air ahead of me, like emeralds, sapphires, and onyx with no regard for gravity.
Interdunal ponds in Indiana Dunes National Park
The trail emptied out onto a public beach. Uncrowded but not empty, the beach hosted picnicking couples, children splashing in the water, a lone swimmer whose tiny dog was floating next to him on a paddleboard. As I made my way back to the car, a freight train rumbled through the park on tracks that I hadn’t noticed the first time around. Hundreds and hundreds of shipping containers stacked two-high thundered by on the other side of a pond. As the freight train was still going, an Amtrak passenger service darted by on a second set of tracks, dwarfed by its cargo-carrying counterpart.
A Chicago-bound freight train passes through the park
As I made my way out of Indiana and into Illinois, the traffic was once again truck-heavy and seemed to simultaneously pull me onward from the front and push me ahead from the back. Boxed in by trucks on either side, I hoped the truckers at least knew I was down there. Chicago gave way to Illinois farm country. There were cows. There was corn. Near Stavanger, a flimsy looking plane like something out of a WWII airshow swooped down to practically touch the crops growing in the field below, dusting them with fertilizer.
Illinois stretched on, steadily marching west towards the mighty Mississippi. Before crossing, I left the highway and headed into downtown Rock Island. Hoping to get a photograph of the steel-arch Centennial Bridge that connects Rock Island to Davenport, IA, I made my way into a riverfront park. The late afternoon sun tinted everything it touched with gold: the fisherman angling from the edge of the walkway, the zumba group set up with a boombox in the park’s modern pavilion, and the fountain that had already soaked a group of giggling preschoolers.
The Centennial Bridge connecting Rock Island, IL to Davenport, IA
From Rock Island, I crossed into Iowa and plunged into the heart of the state. I-80 conducted itself due west into the drooping sun. With my cruise control set to the speed limit, I let the car do most of the work. The driving was beautifully monotonous. I passed trucks and RVs that were going just below the speed limit. Other cars zoomed by to overtake me. The natural processes of the highway ran their course. For hours, my foot didn’t have to touch either the accelerator or the brake. Iowa was a peaceful blur of billboards advertising the next truck stop, wind turbines dutifully whirling away, silos, cornfields, and grain elevators.
I chased the setting sun into downtown Grinnell. The ruby glow cast a nostalgic pall over the facades of the early 20th century buildings lining 4th Avenue. At the corner of 4th and Broad sat the Merchant’s National Bank building, an icon built in 1914 and designed by Louis Sullivan as part of a series of small Midwestern banks. The geometric diamond pattern that makes the entrance so recognizable had been recreated with paving stones in seemingly every intersection in the downtown district. A group of older men had spilled out of a bar onto the sidewalk, already slurring their words at 8 pm. Down the block, a lone man sat silently on a bench next to a postal service drop box. A young couple walked by dark storefronts, peering in to try to get a glimpse. Leaving town, I trudged the three miles back to the interstate, passing hotel after hotel. Two miles down I-80, I nestled into a rest stop for the night. Behind me, a tractor-trailer’s cab generator rumbled a soft lullaby.
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