Book review: “Walking Chicago’s Coast: A 63-Mile Journey to the Indiana Dunes” by Michael McColly

Based on its bright, attractive cover of the lakeshore skyline, Walking Chicago’s Coast looks like one of those ain’t-Chicago-great booster books. It has the look of a book written to promote the city as a world-class metropolis with amazing restaurants, a wonderful theater scene, big league sports, magnificent architecture and the greatest urban lakefront on earth.

But that look is deceiving. Michael McColly’s book about his 63-mile walk along the Lake Michigan shore over a two-day period during a hot August several years ago isn’t a celebration of Chicago.

It is, rather, an indictment of the myriad ways human beings have failed in their stewardship of the natural world and their stewardship of each other.

 

“My apocalyptic fears and apoplectic rage”

Indeed, halfway through his walk, after spending a night at the Majestic Star Casino in Gary (which closed in 2021), McColly works his way with difficulty to the Lake Michigan water, past a fence and a sign warning of hazardous materials, and finds “carbonized bits of slag, glass chips, oxidized iron nails, and metals old and newly made.”

In a handful of sand, McColly can spot “bits of green and blue, yellow and red, white and black, beads of plastic…With a powerful magnifying glass I’d be able to see microbeads from soaps, solvents and a myriad of plastics used for just about everything we consume.”  Much easier to examineare the layers and layers of plastic trash:

You lean over and pick up an errant plastic bottle at your feet and magically before your eyes appear two or three more. You pick them up and more cry out. The beach is flooded with stuff: tampon dispensers, caps and lids, pens, lighters, straws, cups, cutlery.

Not only all of this, but also a high-heeled shoe, a poker chip, a toy football, a plastic champagne glass, a two-gallon container for gasoline, a knotted cord of plastic rope and a buoy the size of McColly’s leg.

The plastic trash I see strewn here and everywhere collects in my mind. It isn’t recycled. It compounds. It feeds my apocalyptic fears and apoplectic rage at all who can’t see what I see in each piece of plastic.

 

“Slow Violence”

Walking Chicago’s Coast: A 63-Mile Journey to the Indiana Dunes, published by Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, is a book about McColly’s “apocalyptic fears and apoplectic rage” at much of what he saw on his walk, particularly “the dystopian landscapes defiled by dumping, environmental devastation, and economic disaster.”

Indeed, he notes that, in Gary as well as many other places along the lakefront away from the shiny skyscrapers of Chicago’s downtown, environmental destruction and its effects on people goes on all the time—and has for decades.

Day by day, year by year, the effects of poverty and toxic environments take their toll not only on the physical and psychological health but also on the health of the social networks and public institutions all cities need to function.

This, McColly writes, is “slow violence,” employing a term coined by environmental writer Rob Nixon to describe the incremental process of ruin in which the environments of the poor throughout the world are destroyed.

The idea for McColly’s walk came after he suffered a panic attack while swimming in Lake Michigan off of Loyola Park in Rogers Park where he lived. Panic attacks, he explains, are part of his life along with depression and an HIV diagnosis dating back to the mid-1990s.

A native of Marion, Indiana, McColly moved to Chicago in 1980 with the idea of being an actor. He left to join the Peace Corps in Senegal and returned to study theology at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. McColly, who is single, has worked at the Field Museum and has taught creative writing at several Chicago-area colleges and universities. And he has done a great deal of walking.

 

Which Chicago coast?

That day of the panic attack, McColly writes, the idea of walking the lakefront came out of nowhere but quickly captivated him. He stood on the sand at Loyola Park and looked south to see if he could spot the “telltale plumes of Gary’s steelworks.” Those structures and similar mills at Burns Harbor bracket the Indiana Dunes where he had often gone as a refuge.

Back in his third-floor apartment, he began to map out his journey, and, as he describes it in his book, it seems that there was never any question for him about what Chicago coast he would walk.

Someone else might have chosen to limit the trip to only the 30 miles of lakefront shoreline within Chicago’s boundaries, from Evanston to Indiana. Or decided to include the 37 miles of northern suburbs, among the richest in the nation, up to the Wisconsin state line.

But, McColly writes, he envisioned a 63-mile walk from Rogers Park to Burns Harbor through places with “names now synonymous with America’s industrial decline and its environmental and human sacrifices—South Shore, South Chicago, East Side, Hammond, Whiting, East Chicago, and Gary…Here are steel mills next to playgrounds, hills of coal along riverbanks, slag piles overtaking sand dunes.”

 

“A fortress wall”

Even in the glitziest, most boosterish parts of Chicago’s lakefront, such as Millennium Park, McColly wasn’t dazzled by the sparkle and flash.

Leaving Grant Park, he writes of looking up at “Michigan Avenue’s stone wall, a showcase of American urban architecture” and seeing the buildings as “a line of occupying soldiers, shoulder to shoulder” working with the Chicago River and the expressways to “collectively function as a fortress wall that separates the city center from the surrounding neighborhoods.”  And he adds:

These sleek towers of steel and glass project the ever-growing disparities in wealth and power amassed by those on the top. Walking into it, the inspiration that I once felt in the first years I lived here has been replaced by a feeling of alienation. If this is the heart of the city, it beats not for me but rather only for a select few.

This story of might and power pushing aside people and their human needs and yearnings is one that McColly tells repeatedly in his book.

 

“Wild beauty”

Yet, with all of his dark messages of toxic waste and ruined wetlands, McColly writes that, in the Indiana Dunes National Park near the end of his walk, he found hope, and it came as a message from his exhausted body.

Faith, it says, have faith in what lies below, for it is all that we have and all that we are, no more, no less. Feel it, know it, care for it, die for it.

Originally this shoreline was a vast wetland intermingled with dunes, and the remnant of those natural settings, the Indiana Dunes, “could temper our hubris and remind us that we are beholden to the elemental forces that brought life from the mire and muck.”

After two days of walking, McColly has watched over and over again how natural forces of life and beauty have persisted in the midst of human junk and poison, and he writes:

I hadn’t bargained for this cumulative effect of wild beauty defined by rust and ragweed, flora and fauna indifferent to the mess of human history.

And, at this moment, McColly writes, he is filled with gratitude.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

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