You really can’t go home again

Friend Jean told me that the newspaper had a feature on the Indiana Dunes and she thought that was where my family and I spent summers. It was, and I was excited about seeing the article, anticipating memory-evoking prose and maybe some familiar scenes. She brought me the article when we had supper at Tokyo Café tonight, and I could hardly wait to get home to read it.

A major disappointment. At first glance, I thought it wonderful that the Dunes had been upgraded to national park status, but reading further on I realized that the national park is a much larger swath of land that encompasses the smaller Indiana Dunes State Park of my memory. A major highway cuts through the national park which also encompasses such surrounding towns as Chesterton, Valparaiso, and Beverly Shores—all familiar names from my day but surely not part of the park. Tours suggest staying in those towns, down to what B&Bs and restaurants are recommended.

In my day, some sixty-plus years ago, there were two entries to the park—the beach, which featured a pavilion—we called it The Pavilion—which was always to my mind crowded and dirty. People were not careful with their bathroom habits, their food, and their trash. To get to our secluded cabin by the beach, we would have had to pick our way through crowds of beach bathers (I have less attractive names for them) and then walk a mile down the beach, in the hot sun, carrying whatever we needed. My family much preferred the woods.

We would park in a small parking lot with a canteen that was sometimes open, sometimes not. Then out came the duffel bags and backpacks because we had to carry clothes, groceries, books, whatever we needed, and we headed into the woods. I can almost follow the route and the various trails in my memory, though surely if I were there today, I’d be lost. Usually we went in the daytime, but I remember one night when Dad stopped all of us on the trail to let a skunk pass. A mile of up and down on sandy trails, watching for poison ivy, and we were home, home being a small cabin with no running water (a cistern pump), no electricity, and an outhouse. We thought we were uptown when we got bottled gas for cooking and a real refrigerator.

The back of our cabin looked out over the serene woods, while the front, high up on a dune, offered a spectacular view of Lake Michigan. The cabin sat literally at the southernmost tip of the vast lake, and it was where I learned to love storms, watching them roll down the length of the lake from the north.

I got no sense of that long lost world from the article, which seemed written for the tourist who wants to drive, in comfort, from one B&B to the next one, with a nod to those who want to hike. A two-mile trail takes in the Bailly homestead, site of early settlers to the area. It was definitely not in the park I knew.

My dad and a friend owned the cabin as bachelor physicians, and we continued to share it with that other family all the years I remember. Sometime along the way the State of Indiana exercised it eminent domain rights and took over the cabins, leasing them back to previous owners every year. It was always a waiting game—would the lease arrive this year? In 1969, the year my folks retired and moved to North Carolina, the lease was cancelled. The state rented the cabins as weekend getaways for a few years and then burned them all.

I don’t think I could bear to go back and see the spot where our cabin stood, though the way dunes shift and change the landscape, I probably couldn’t even find it. But I often go back in my mind. I had a favorite spot, halfway down the dune to the beach, on a path to friends’ cabin. There was a little outcropping, and at sunset I could sit there, my arm around Timmy, our collie mix, and watch the sun set behind the skyscrapers of Chicago, some forty miles across the lake. The sun would be a huge red ball and the skyscrapers, tiny black dots in front of it. Sitting there, in my mind these days, I am in my safe spot.

I guess maybe memories are better than today’s reality.